


A Flight in the Dark

by imperialhuxness



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Bickering, Gas Station Robberies, Getting Together, Getting to Know Each Other, Hotel Sex, M/M, Mission Fic, On the Run, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Force, Why does Kylo keep saving Hux?, Wilderness, hmm I wonder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 00:02:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21436867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhuxness/pseuds/imperialhuxness
Summary: When a tribute negotiation on the mining world Chelloa goes horribly wrong, Hux--to his unending dismay--finds himself fleeing the capital with the new Supreme Leader.Forced to depend on Kylo Ren and his connection to the Force for survival, he definitely doesn't come to appreciate Ren's abilities. Or find himself caring about his former rival.Not in the slightest.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 100
Kudos: 378
Collections: Kylux Big Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Gorgeous art by the fantastic and legendary [Gaylo Ben](https://gaylo-ben.tumblr.com/)! Thank you so much for the wonderful prompt, and for all your encouragement as this story came together--it's been a pleasure working with you <33

Hux never goes planetside without an itinerary. 

Such visits are rare enough to require a certain amount of fastidious planning: to-the-minute arrival and departure data, alphanumeric talking point outlines, ten standard cycles’ advance notice. At least two emergency contingency plans. 

It’s efficient. Circumspect. It avoids waste of time and resources.

There was, therefore, a detailed schedule for this mission: a routine procurement meeting on baradium-rich Chelloa.

According to that schedule, Hux should already be back on the _ Finalizer _, drafting notes for an after-action report and adding a quarterly baradium tribute to the Order’s materiel roster. 

He should _ not _\--under any circumstances--have had reason to leave the provincial capital. 

He certainly shouldn’t--by some twist of probability--be fearing for his life and sanity on the back of the galaxy’s loudest stolen speeder-bike. Especially not one piloted by none other than Kylo ‘Unnecessary Mission Supervisor’ Ren.

(Probability, however, is a sadistic motherfucker.)

The worst part about this (Hux thinks, gripping Ren’s waist so tightly he’s sure his joints have locked into place) is that Ren can’t even handle the damn machine.

Or well. He can. He hasn’t crashed it yet, anyway. It’s just that he’s clearly never received any sort of training in terms of appropriate speed or acceleration levels. He’s gunning the thing like it’s a starfighter. Like if he just gives it enough fuel it’ll blast clear away from this narrow dirt lane and into hyperspace.

It’s a good thing there isn’t any worthwhile scenery here, or Hux would be missing it. But he knows--more from prior research than the blurs of gray and brown streaking past on either side of the road--that it’s just flat agricultural land through here, dead at the tail-end of winter, punctuated occasionally by patches of boreal forest. (Those, they haven’t hit yet.)

For the first several kilometers, Hux had hardly even opened his eyes, getting used, he told himself, to the flying dust stirred by the speeder’s sputtering thrusters. It’s a rusty thing, and _ noisy _ , its motivator generating something closer to a _ roar _than the expected hum. 

Hux still isn’t convinced the racket is the reason Ren didn’t react to his definitely-not-panicked _ ‘slow the fuck down _’ of perhaps an hour ago, but he knew better than to wear his voice out making sure. 

They still haven’t crashed yet, somehow, and Ren’s steering is solid, at least, hugging the curves of the countryside lane with considerable dexterity, even on the clunky bike. 

Hux’s pulse has slowed from the initial pounding, though the knot in his stomach remains, like a cold, damp cave formation that can only grow, never erode. 

At least he’s managed to open his eyes, though he’s pressed so tightly to Ren that it takes effort to look at anything but the rough black fabric of his cloak. Ren’s warm even through it, which helps somewhat against the icy breeze lifted by the repulsors in the cold air.

It’s just going to get colder, Hux knows. They’re traveling northward, to the closest provincial border. Unfortunately, it’s now the only way off this rock.

That’s through no fault in Hux’s planning, but still. With hindsight the only alternative to Ren’s cloak or the dizzying, dull landscape, it’s obvious: his itinerary was falling apart before he even left the _ Finalizer. _

Not that it hadn’t started off well enough: Chelloa’s baradium resources had rendered the otherwise uninteresting planet a high enough priority to merit Hux’s personal attention--and careful study. 

After determining a viable, largely diplomatic approach, he’d forwarded Ren--sorry_ , the Supreme Leader _\--his temporary deployment notice and a copy of the deal with which he intended to bludgeon the local government. He’d expected it to tumble directly into whatever yawning abyss Ren’s Holomail address leads to, unnoticed, until Ren realized no one was rolling their eyes at him behind his back on the bridge.

Hux had, therefore, altogether failed to anticipate the two alerts that arrived less than a standard hour later: one, an actual reply to his message; the other, an actual deployment _ form _ , completed meticulously. (The reply had read, without greeting or signature: _ I will accompany you _.)

It still pisses Hux off now, just thinking about it. A million more pressing concerns, this gods-awful speeder bike buzzing in his ears like some bloodsucking insect, and his arms looped around Ren’s waist, and _ nothing _incenses him like being micromanaged.

He honestly hadn’t taken Ren for the type, given the resemblance of his pre-existing track record to that of a fathier wearing blinders. But apparently the Supreme Leader--after months of apparent ignorance to the nebulous assassination plans that have been churning below the surface of Hux’s mind since Crait--had decided that Hux couldn’t be trusted with a perfectly standard planetary acquisition.

Of course, Hux has to admit, with the wind biting his face and the bleak, dormant farmland zipping past, if not for Ren’s sudden interest in procurement affairs, he’d still be in the planetary capital. Possibly with a hole in the back of his head.

***

The meetings had started off well enough, certainly. Bombastic greetings from the local officials, and little glasses of an incongruently weak tea. (Ren didn’t touch it, given the newly-mended mask. Hux politely gagged down sips at ten-minute intervals.)

The Chelloan Satrapy had appeared interested in the Order’s key propositions--namely assistance in improving its outdated mining infrastructure and irrigation systems. And Hux had been _ on _ , that blood-buzzing sensation of knowing exactly what you want, and just where to bend and press and needle and _ strike _to get it.

He thought he’d be back on the _ Finalizer _before the end of beta shift.

However, the negotiations had stalled out entirely when the High Satrap suddenly brought up a heretofore unsubstantiated grievance against the Empire. Apparently, Palpatine’s forces had commandeered a high volume of baradium exports without the offer of aid.

Hux had found no record of such a thing, but was in no position to argue facts. He’d pivoted instead to the idea that his offer had already taken this into account, and for that reason had been so generous all along. 

To no avail.

_ “Reparations are in order,” _the High Satrap had said, and pounded her four-fingered fist on the table as if to catch the reparations and pin them down.

Any and all counterargument, for the following half-hour, had been met only with variations on the former, with additions in the vein of, _ “Our people were gravely misused by your predecessors. We seek financial reparations in the amount that was stolen, plus ten-percent interest.” _

Ren had sat through this routine obnoxiously taciturn. By the third repetition, Hux had hoped he’d be at least annoyed enough to intervene. Probably in a threatening and unhelpful way, but still. It would have at least been cathartic to see someone respond appropriately to this bantha shit.

However, Ren had decided he’d rather not be distinguishable from the dark reliefs decorating the room, or for that matter, the ornately carved chairs surrounding the conference table.

At the next break, Hux had attempted to bring the problem with this to his attention.

Having retreated into a windowless powder room attached to the conference suite, he was holding his cold tea as a sort of shield, the semblance of casualness.

“Supreme Leader,” he’d done his best to cajole, “can you not do anything to...assist our cause out there?”

Ren’s voice had been hollow, flat, even with the tinny echo of the mended mask. “What do you mean?”

That really should have been the first sign something was wrong: Ren for once not jumping both to action and the chance to show off.

“I’m certain,” Hux replied, “that every Chelloan in the room could forget they’ve ever heard the word _ reparations, _given the proper push.”

It isn’t an entirely new mask, obviously, but for some reason it feels more opaque than it used to, like it’s a familiar text translated to a foreign language, one Hux can’t even begin to parse. 

Still, Hux had detected a hint of incredulity, at least at first:

“You’re _ asking me _ to use my abilities,” Ren had said, and paused as if to consider the implications of this, something Hux himself would prefer not to do. Then he--in typical Ren fashion--had dismissed it offhand in favor of something even more cryptic: “For _ that. _Now.”

“No, I’m asking you to use them next week when we have to return with a battalion.” It had taken great restraint to maintain the deadpan, then to clear his throat, check himself. “Of course now. This has already taken nearly twice the allotted time, and they’re refusing to budge. Isn’t that what you came for?”

“No,” Ren said, like that was a complete thought. “That isn’t the problem here.”

“Then what, pray tell, is?”

Ren didn’t respond, just glanced abruptly over his shoulder toward the door, as if someone had knocked. No one had. This was only slightly unnerving.

“We need to get out,” he’d said. “Now.”

“Now?” Hux parroted back. “Why?”

It was then that the whine of blaster fire rang out from the nearest corridor.

***

So, fine. It had turned out fairly fortuitous that Ren had come along, if only his speeder piloting skills weren’t about to get Hux killed. 

A sudden burst of velocity swoops his stomach, and he digs his fingertips even more tightly into Ren’s waist in a struggle against inertia. 

A patch of woods looms on the horizon, breaking up the farmland and now rapidly approaching. _ Cover _, Hux realizes, squinting into the wind. Hux would be racing toward it, too.

***

“You can’t keep gunning the fuel,” Hux is saying, pacing a clump of trees several meters off the road. Perhaps an hour into the woods, Ren’s pulled the bike over for a break. “We’ll be stranded in no time if you don’t lighten up on it.”

Ren’s bent over the bike, examining the gauges installed below the transparisteel windshield. “Yeah, well. We’ll be captured in no time if I do.”

“Yet we’ll definitely be captured if we get stuck on the side of the lane with a speeder that will no longer start.”

Ren rounds to the back of the bike, manually adjusts a plast cap that must belong to the fuel tank. It’s a concession perhaps, if unconscious. (Hux hopes.)

“You just don’t trust me to control it,” he says, without looking up. Hux could have read the mask better than his face right now, which means to tread carefully.

“Not at all.” Hux stops at the edge of the small clearing, turns around, and loops back to lean over the bike’s handlebars. 

Ren still won’t make eye contact. “You’ve never even been on one of these before.”

“The Academy incorporated sims--”

Ren just snorts. “_ Sims. _”

A defense of the curriculum half-congeals on Hux’s tongue, but he bites it back, refusing to rise to the bait. Ren’s needling, trying to get him off-topic. As he does.

What comes out instead, though, is less than relevant: “So where did _ you _get so good with them?”

Ren finally straightens to his full height, but only to shrug. The flicker in his eyes belies the gesture, though. But again, Hux knows better than to prod at any of it. At least, though, it gets _ Ren _to redirect to the question at hand, for a change.

“I assume there’s at least some civilization on this road before the border.” It ought to be a question, but it’s nowhere near so deferential.

Hux thins his lips in an effort not to visibly bristle. “I studied Chelloa’s policy, Supreme Leader, not its traffic patterns.” Ren starts at that, but Hux cuts him off. “Yet one could safely assume there would be a fuel outpost or two, if not lanes connecting to some of the villages. It’s all agricultural up here.”

“That’s what I meant,” Ren says, measured. “I’d call those decent odds.”

“Perhaps,” Hux grants, and makes the mistake of looking up. 

The sky is already going pinkish at the edges, the first sun’s final rays stabbing out from under the cloud cover as it tracks toward the horizon. Its counterpart must not be far behind.

“We’ll need more than just fuel,” Hux says. “We’ll need water, supplies. Somewhere to rest.”

His first act upon disembarking the bike was to take inventory of the stolen speeder’s saddlebag. It contents are fairly meager: a single water bottle (passed reluctantly between Hux and Ren) and a few pieces of a local fruit that must have been intended for a snack, a credchip holder (useless and trackable), some flimsi tissues, no tech to speak of.

Ren runs a hand through his hair, brushing it out of his face, but not quite behind his ear. “How safe would one of the villages be? For an overnight stop, I mean. Or supplies too, I suppose.”

Since when is Hux supposed to be the fucking Chelloan almanac? Under normal circumstances, Ren would at least know _ something _ about the world he’s operating on, but with the abruptness of his tagalong on this mission, he’s apparently counting on Hux to function as his briefer. 

If the topic in question was weapons engineering, thermonuclear physics, theories of warfare, the treatment would be flattering. As it is, though, it’s an obnoxious reminder of just how ill-equipped Hux is for any of this.

“I don’t know if the rural regions are connected enough to the rest of the province,” he snaps. “We’ll simply have to see if they’re looking for us.”

Ren tenses at that, and Hux holds his breath for the comeback. He draws mental battle lines, prepares to stand his ground. 

Instead, though, the corner of Ren’s mouth twitches upward unexpectedly, in something oddly like a smile. “As you advise, General.”

The compliment in Ren’s acquiescence would feel falser if it weren’t--reasonably--par for the course since his ascent to the throne. 

After, well, the _ bruises _ on the day he had, Hux had been expecting even worse treatment than under Snoke. However, the opposite had been true. Of course, Ren’s still morbidly short-sighted, and must often be argued down for the good of the Order, but he often does actually _ listen _ to Hux’s suggestions. Even implements them. 

Hux is being kept alive for something, anyway, and he’s been in the business of making himself as useful as possible. 

And at least Ren’s given him the chance to make up for. Well. His _ assistance _earlier this afternoon.

***

It wasn’t that he panicked at the sound of blaster fire. 

He couldn’t if he tried, not when it lulled him to sleep as a toddler on Arkanis--rhythmic, measured, endless loop on the training range above the children’s quarters. He’d been aboard the _ Eclipse _perhaps a standard week before they put a pistol in his hand. Other cadets--the new ones, from less important worlds--covered their ears. 

Hux didn’t flinch then, but he did today, at the sheer shock of it, fingers straying to his own holster per years of programming.

“What the fuck,” he breathed, redirecting his hand to his datapad. Until and unless a bolt flew past his head, information would be a more useful weapon.

“Resistance,” Ren said, like it was a curse. The mended mask’s lack of vocoder is its only redeeming quality: Ren’s inflection is even easier to read. There was rage there now, but something else, too: an unusual note of fear. “I knew. I mean, I should have--”

“You knew?” Hux hissed. “And failed to mention this information?”

Another bolt whistled outside the powder room, notably louder. Closer. The walls looked anything but plasma-proof.

Ren’s gaze followed the sound over his shoulder. “I didn’t _ know. _I just sensed…” He cut himself off, turns the mask’s slatted muzzle back to Hux. “I hoped it was nothing. It usually is.”

Hux popped his lips, jabbed at the datapad screen. A white _ x _decorated the top data menu where the signal strength should have been. 

“Not this time,” he replied, belatedly. “_Damnit.” _The datapad’s Settings dashboard showed no compatible signals of any kind. “Is yours a brick, too?”

“Probably.” Nonetheless, Ren extracted his own datapad from the folds of his robe. His non-response after a few forceful taps was answer enough.

“Fucking good jammer,” Hux muttered, but it came out breathless, less than angry. His pulse had escalated, anxiety begun to curdle in the pit of his stomach, cold and ineluctable.

“Yeah, well--”

Another bolt shrieked somewhere outside the room, perhaps from the level directly below. A second followed it, then a third. A regular volley. Screams. The unmistakable clatter of falling plastoid armor. They only brought twenty troopers.

“They won’t last,” Hux said aloud, nonsequitur. 

But Ren seemed to follow. “I’m sure the Resistance was counting on that.”

“Leaving you vulnerable,” Hux said. “Or at least more so than usual.”

“And you.”

Hux shrugged. He wasn’t the Supreme Leader, but he had no trouble imagining a target on his back. He squeezed his fingers to still their sudden tremor and turned his attention back to the datapad. 

If he could at least get information on the jammer--the range of the dead zone, any accompanying shields or emergency announcements… 

He still wouldn’t have access to Order applications or comms--compatible only with its encrypted network--but it would be something.

“We need to get moving.” Ren’s voice was taut, every syllable like a sharp note.

“Give me a _ moment, _” Hux shot back, forgetting for the moment any veneer of respect. His slicing software had nearly completed its process. He cursed as it showed results: a map of this entire province, covered in the red netting of a dead zone for the Order, overlaid with the white of a heavy-duty ion shield.

“What?” Ren said, even as more blasterfire from outside drew his attention.

“No transports or comms are getting in or out of here.” _ We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re dead in the water, we-- _

“_ What _,” Ren repeated.

“What I said. I don’t--”

Ren held up a hand. Hux shut up before realizing there was no Force in the gesture, just ordinary command. Ren tucked away his datapad and moved closer to the locked doors in front of him, and closer, until the side of the mask clacked against the durasteel.

A part of Hux was just _ waiting _ for a bolt to scream through the wall and out the other side of the helmet. Ordinarily, it might have been acceptable. Certainly wouldn’t have been the messiest way Hux has imagined taking up Ren’s title. But under the current circumstances, he wouldn’t even make it back to the _ Finalizer _ to be recognized as Supreme Leader. 

He didn’t breathe as bolts shrieked outside, closer than ever, at last were appended with the clatter of armor. Then stopped. Ren had a hand splayed against the door, but curled it into a fist after the silence had lasted about a standard minute.

“Come on,” he said, without turning around.

“Come where?”

Ren didn’t answer the question. Just nodded to Hux’s datapad and took his own back out. He set it on the floor. “I’m sure they’ll be able to track these.”

“Track them _ where _?” Hux asked, not complying. He debated whether to tell Ren to take off his belt, too, but addressed the more pressing concern instead: “Wherever we go, we’ll need a secure comm. If we can get the network connected again.” He powers his own down, tucks it back into his greatcoat. “But there’s no need for two possible risks.”

Ren fortunately didn’t argue the point. He held out his hand toward his datapad until the screen shattered, then muttered something about _ emergency exit _ before stepping back from the door enough to flick his wrist at it. It opened soundlessly, and Hux had no choice but to follow.

In the corridor outside, power to the capitol building seemed to have been cut off--the lights were dim. Shadows threw eerie undulations in Hux’s periphery as he pounded down the hall after Ren, glancing periodically over his shoulder.

He managed not to think about anything but following Ren’s shadow, maneuvering around bodies, both white-armored and Resistance, until they’d finally reached a dingy _ Employees Only _exit behind several blown locks.

It was lighter in here than the rest of the building, thanks to a low, streaked window. Somehow, the suns were shining outside.

Ren had ditched the mask unceremoniously at that point, claiming it was ‘recognizable.’ As if Hux and the rest of himself weren’t the equivalent of a flashing neon bullseye. But still. It showed a promising level of self-awareness. 

And of course, it was good to know it was still hiding nothing uglier than the puckered line from Starkiller. 

But on top of that, being without it perhaps helped when he stopped and speederjacked an unsuspecting Chelloan two alleys over.

Perhaps it even drew fewer stares as he tore out of the city on detour backroads, Hux clinging to his waist like a lifeline.

***

Hux is still holding on, though the suns disappeared hours ago behind heavy clouds. Now the clouds too have vanished into true night.

Hux doesn’t see the stars, though, until they break the cover of the trees. They’re striking here, even for someone who grew up among them. Cold, bright, damn near _ fierce _, lighting the lane ahead in unforgiving white. It’s a clear night, and there’s neither sign nor need of moon.

Right. Hux read that Chelloa doesn’t have one. Its single ocean is, therefore, more like a stagnant lake, steadily shrinking under centuries of baradium waste. Yet another reason the irrigation system should have been such a strong incentive at today’s meetings. Yet another reminder of how morbidly Hux managed to fuck this up.

It’s a damn wonder that Ren bothered extracting him at all after an error like this. Hux’s strategic judgment is the key asset he offers Ren. It’s what’s been keeping him alive for the past few months. He wouldn’t have done the same, in Ren’s position.

(It was Snoke, after all, who ordered Ren’s second chance after Starkiller.)

(See how many pieces that had left him in.)

Unlike Snoke, however, Ren hasn’t offered so much as a word of censure over the past eight hours. 

_ Enjoy it while it lasts, _ Hux’s brain nags. Ren’s focused on survival right now. He’ll hear all about it once they’re safely back on the _ Finalizer. _Provided they make it that far.

_ One problem at a time. _Hux does his best to box up that particular dread, shove it into a neglected corner of his mind, a tidy, sealed compartment.

A fresh gust of wind blows east to west, jarring the speeder’s course. Hux’s stomach flips, and he holds on tighter, hating that he has to.

***

The blue lights of a fuel station materialize slowly on the horizon, like a bad holo signal crackling into full connection. 

Hux at first thinks it’s a trick of the starlight and his own exhaustion, but as the speeder drags toward the landscape’s sole source of illumination, the reality sinks again: Hux and Ren aren’t, in fact, the only sentient life forms in the province. 

A flare of anxiety comes with that--the closest Hux can get to stagefright--the terror of being _ seen _. Here, it means death or capture. 

But the fuel gauge readout on the display screen is glowing red between Ren’s gloves, and there’s only half a liter of water in the saddlebag slapping against Hux’s calf. Stopping is a risk of catastrophe; keeping on without doing so makes it a certainty.

Hux has been getting numb back here, eyelids periodically drooping, but the surge of adrenaline that comes with the sudden possibility of a threat stiffens his spine and electrifies his bloodstream. He’s rigid as the fuel station rolls closer, the neon lettering on the roadsign coalescing only into the illegible characters of an indigenous alphabet. It’s a good sign that they’re far from civilization, at any rate. Hopefully far enough to avoid recognition.

Still, Ren’s turning into the station’s lot far too soon. The speeder’s thrusters stir spumes of gray dust that glimmer unnaturally under the chemical lighting of the metal canopy overhead. Hux blinks against it as the bike groans to a stop beside a rusty fuel pump. Ren powers it off, leaving tinnitus in place of the racket of the motivator. 

Hux clambers off behind Ren, working his jaw in an attempt to pop his eardrums, stretching his stiff legs. A flimsi sign on the pump--fortunately in aurebesh and something like Basic above the local script--reads: **PAYMENT INSIDE ACCEPTED.** **  
**

The fuel station’s shop is only a few meters to the right. A single lampdisk flickers under its front awning, and cracks spider the transparisteel of its front doors, as if they’ll shatter at the slightest inclination, and bring the whole storefront down with them. The fracture lines warp the shop’s interior, but Hux can make out the kaleidoscope impressions of a dusty counter and a few low shelves stocked with provisions.

Ren’s gaze darts, frenetic, between Hux, the sign, and the storefront. _ Hunted _is a terrible look on him.

“Well,” Hux says, after a moment of what has to be indecision, and goes for the fuel tank cap. 

The thing’s old, rusty, and the plast squeaks painfully as he unscrews it. (It’s _ manual _, not bio or machine-coded. It’s a marvel this relic hasn’t fallen apart underneath them.) 

When Hux looks up, sets the reeking cap on the seat while the pungent fuel scent effuses into the air, Ren’s pulling his cloak off over his tangled hair without unclasping it. He holds it out to Hux in a wad.

“I’ll expect this back when I’m done in there.”

“I have a coat.” Hux gestures uselessly to the article in question and reaches for the nozzle on the fuel pump. 

Ren maneuvers in front of him, proffers the cloak again, as if for emphasis. “Your coat doesn’t have a hood.” His voice drops to a harsh whisper. “I know a low profile is difficult for you, but--”

It’s all Hux can do not to roll his eyes, despite the fact that Ren has a point. He snatches the cloak gracelessly from Ren’s hand, unfurls it to find the hood. “Don’t be long,” he says, pulling the thing over his head.

“I won’t.”

Hux adjust the cloak around his shoulders, making sure the Order emblem on his bicep is well-concealed, before flipping up the cowl. Even if he had his command cap with him, the insignia on that would only function as a target out here.

He chafes his hands together--they’re cold and stiff even under the gloves--and hates the fuel-sheen greasing the fingertips. They’re going to smell for days.

Whatever. At least whatever poorly filtered slop this rust bucket’s going to run on won’t get on and subsequently eat his skin. 

Luckily, the fuel flows as soon as Hux squeezes the nozzle. It’s possibly a function of the pump’s decidedly un-automated nature, or perhaps it took Ren less time than expected to..._ convince _the clerk. This is also inconsequential. 

Hux stares at the rubber tube until his vision doubles and triples it into something like a musical staff. The fuel egresses with a rhythmic thump. It’s got to have been a decade since Hux last did something this _ hands-on _when it comes to a vehicle. He’d jumped from mechanics to design as soon as the Academy’s curriculum had allowed.

The tank takes more fuel than the speeder looks like it could handle, and the steady pulse of it is unnervingly lulling. Hux blinks, forces a glance up at the harsh acetylene lampdisk overhead, then toward the storefront. 

The splintered doors still don’t show much detail, but the store’s interior is cast in an unmistakable red glow. A pixelated screen stuck on an ad for some green, fizzy beverage entirely covers one of the windows next to it, but Hux cranes his neck to see into the one past it.

All that’s visible of Ren is the crackling tip of his lightsaber, easily spanning the breadth of a narrow counter to hover near the chest of a Rodian in a dusty apron. One moment, the xeno’s short antennae are upright, a nervous light in their compound eyes. The next, they’ve all but deflated, muscles relaxed, eyes dull, antennae drooping. Their snout dips as if they’re speaking. Then the lightsaber flicks out. The rest of the store returns to the sallow lighting of minutes ago.

Hux releases a pent-up breath. It isn’t like he was nervous--Kylo fucking Ren could take out a hundred store-clerks with his eyes closed (that’s not a compliment, but a simple fact, like gravity or a chemical compound). But of course, that’s exactly the problem: they can’t leave a lightsaber-riddled trail of bodies across the province. 

But there’s no need to worry about that, not right now. Crisis averted, at least for the present. Hux watches the storefront through the warped glass, Ren distinguishable as a black shadow that periodically moves into its frame.

Hux turns his attention back to the bike as two things happen:

One: The fuel pump clicks off, signaling a full tank.

But Hux has no time to remove the nozzle before--

Two: An accented voice rings out from the pump to his right.

“Holy shit. You’re him.”

Hux’s heart rate skyrockets. Zero to five parsecs per hour. Leaps and bounds, blood loud in his ears. He adjusts the cowl, pulls Ren’s cloak tighter around his shoulders. His hand strays toward his blaster, but he stops it in time.

_ No use leaving a trail of bodies across the province. _

He’s apparently been so out of it that he missed a sizeable landspeeder pulling into the pump behind his own. In his periphery, a bearded human in ratty chaps, a long braid down their back, leans against the speeder’s chassis.

Probably drunk. Nothing to worry about. Hux returns the nozzle to the pump, turns to get the tank cap. 

“Hey, I know you heard me.” _ Ignore it, ignore it. _“Hux.”

_ Ignore— _

In Hux’s periphery, the local’s hand strays toward a thigh holster.

Hux is faster. Has no choice but to be, operating on the combat instincts drilled into him before he understood what they were for.

His blaster is in his hand before he can assess the situation. His finger is on the trigger. His vision tunnels to the local’s tattered fingerless glove. The blaster’s barrel follows, and Hux’s finger twitches. 

A fresh black hole chars the center of the glove, smoking. A shrill scream rends the air, and oh. Yes. The hand is attached to a person.

Who’s clutching the maimed hand with their free one. Who’s watching as doors on both sides of the speeder fly open, allowing out another human and a Rodian, dressed similarly. Both have blasters drawn.

“Hands up,” barks the Rodian. “The Resistance has a solid price on your head.”

Hux has his blaster trained on the Rodian, but remains all too aware of the uninjured human’s sights.

“You’re mistaken,” he says, attempting to flatten his accent. It comes out as a ghastly imitation of Ren’s. 

“I don’t think so,” says the uninjured human. 

The injured one just whimpers and glares.

Hux’s hands and voice are somehow steady. “My friend and I are on our way back home to—“

The Rodian’s eyes narrow. “And your friend just happens to have a red lightsaber.”

Fuck, how long have these bastards been watching them?

Of course, they must also be absolute imbeciles to see a red lightsaber and run _ toward _it, rather than away. Typical Resistance: confusing foolhardiness with courage.

It doesn’t matter how bankrupt the philosophy may be, though. It’s still about to get Hux killed. Or at least captured.

They may not be able to take a Force-user, but they could get Hux into that speeder before Ren so much as realizes he’s gone. Perhaps he wouldn’t even care.

A bizarre image flashes into his mind: Ren negotiating his release with Resistance leadership. (_ How many planets is a skinny engineer worth? _)

As if.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hux says.

If he could get close enough, there’s a chance he could disarm one, then shoot the other before they can react. 

“Drop your weapon.” The Rodian gestures down with their own. 

“No.”

“The Resistance wants you in one piece.”

Overhead, a lampdisk crackles, flickers. Sputters out.

Hux thins his lips as shadow falls over him. It shouldn’t affect his aim, but it isn’t like he’ll get another chance to try it, anyway.

“What does the Resistance want with me?” He drags out the vowels, which slurs his speech in his own ears.

The uninjured human snorts at that. 

_ (How many planets is a skinny engineer worth?) _

_ (Probably just the five he exterminated.) _

“I’m not whoever you think I am,” Hux says.

The Rodian looks at their uninjured companion as the one with the maimed hand ducks back into the speeder.

“I’ve heard enough of this,” the Rodian says. And fires.

Hux shoots back reflexively, and there’s the whine of two bolts, the crack of the remaining human’s, a flare of yellow plasma arcing toward Hux’s chest, as if in slow motion, and then—a thud from behind, like plast containers falling to the dust.

All three bolts freeze, triangulated red-blue-yellow between the bike and the larger speeder, blurring into secondary colors where their edges meet.

The Rodian and the human look frozen, too tense, looking wide-eyed at their blaster arms as if trying to stare them into motion.

Hux exhales, finding he can breathe. Can move. 

He turns around. 

A meter behind him stands Ren, right arm outstretched, two dropped plast bags of food and water at his feet. Their contents spill into the dust, stirring it around Ren’s boots.

Adrenaline drains singing from Hux’s veins, and a knot he didn’t realize had twisted in the pit of his stomach begins to unspool.

_ (How many Chelloan ruffians is a skinny engineer worth?) _

“What happened?” Ren’s voice is low, terse, dangerous, possibly with the strain of holding onto the bolts in defiance of the laws of physics. He doesn’t take his gaze from the blur of them, at any rate.

“They saw me,” Hux replies, simply. “And the lightsaber. There’s apparently a bounty out on us.”

Ren’s shadow dapples massive and dark across the dust, nightmarish and gargantuan. It should be more alarming. 

“There’s always a bounty out,” he says, in that same flat tone.

Hux doesn’t make a habit of checking wanted lists. He ignores Ren entirely. In his silence, the cluster of bolts judders toward the Chelloans.

“Don’t,” Hux hisses, at the first movement, the syllable catching high-pitched in the back of his throat.

Neither of the Chelloans’ expressions has changed--if anything, they look blanker, rather than more afraid--and the third has made no move to get out of the speeder. Hux’s apparent defense of them strikes no chord.

“Did you kill the clerk in there?” Hux asks. 

Ren still doesn’t meet his eyes. “No,” he says, with an odd note of amusement in his tone. “Just threatened. Anything else is too messy.”

“There’s..._ probably _\--” Hux inserts the imprecision with effort. “--no need with these. And no time. Can’t you make them forget?”

“I can.” A tremor has crept into Ren’s extended arm. 

Hux knows better than to point it out or express doubt, not with Ren’s gaze flinty and the Force governing three supercharged plasma streams. He forces his eyes away as Ren tells the Chelloans that they’re going to leave now, and forget that they were at the fuel station tonight; that they saw General Hux, himself, or a lightsaber there; and that there is a bounty out for First Order leadership in the province.

Hux flexes his fingers to still them. (It’s always an awful sight, the leather shaking, a reminder that there’s something fleshy and vulnerable in there.) Inhales once, deeply. Wraps his hand around the fuel nozzle and hooks it back onto the pump with a gentle _ clack. _

As Hux screws the fuel tank cap back on, the Chelloans are reciting what they’re going to do. He looks up long enough to see the injured one pressed against one of the speeder’s viewports, lips moving in sync with their companions.

Hux doesn’t move until they’ve all re-boarded the speeder, and have pulled out onto the dark lane, tail lights a vanishing spark. Only the blue and yellow bolts linger in their wake, now fully mingled with Hux’s into a formation like a miniature nebula under the rusty fuel station awning.

Abruptly, Ren’s muscles relax, and the bolts dip terrifyingly downward—toward the pipes under the station—but they seem to skip on thin air after that, then whine in three parallel lines out toward the road, where they skid into the dirt, in a plume of light and sediment, like a particularly festive thermal detonator. It echoes for a moment, then fades to reports, to silence.

Hux wonders from how many kilometers away it was audible or visible, but gets no chance to remark on it.

“Are you all right?”

Hux turns toward Ren, and fuck. He’s the one who should be asking that question. A sheen of sweat clings high on Ren’s forehead, despite the cold. He’s pale even in this harsh lighting, and pulling the same finger-flexing number Hux just did. His breathing, though, seems steadier than Hux’s.

“Yes,” Hux manages to scoff. “Always.”

Ren gives him a long look across the meter of space between them, probing, in his _ I-see-right-through-your-skin _way.

“Good,” he says, finally, then his gaze flits to the litter around his feet as he crouches to start collecting it. 

Hux hasn’t seen him kneel since Crait. It doesn’t suit his broad back.

Hux joins him belatedly, brushing grit off cellophane wrappers and flexiplast bottles before tucking them into the layer of dust at the bottom of the plast bag the supplies rolled out of.

Both their hands get steadier.


	2. Chapter 2

Within a few standard minutes, the fuel station is a blip over Hux’s shoulder: yellow at first, then white, then gone.

He’s holding onto Ren, doing his best to both keep his eyes open and ignore the cold.

The temperature seems to have dropped even since they left the station, and the breeze the bike stirs is almost unbearable.

Almost.

Its only redeeming quality is the distraction it provides from the incessant playback of _ what just happened. _

It isn’t as if his mind never does this—gets stuck like a bad transmission, freezing up, endless-looping. This footage simply happens to be his worst in months.

Since the day Ren took over, in fact. It had taken weeks to recalibrate, after that, on top of Starkiller. This time just might be worse, given it was a show strictly of his own weakness, rather than of Ren’s volatility or security breaches within the Order.

Hux has spent the past thirty years ensuring he is not the kind of person who ever needs saving. That he is _ useful _ in every situation. Worth having, because his value is quantifiable: accuracy per vector, kills per strike, recruits per holomessage, surrenders per hour.

This, of course, is why Ren brought him out of the capital, at apparent risk to his own cover. He’s at least foresighted enough to realize that the Order wouldn’t last long with a bolt through Hux’s brain. 

That has to be it.

Because none of this makes any sense, otherwise.

_ None of this _changes the fact that Hux is anything but an asset right now, or has been, for the past eight-plus hours.

At least the last time Ren pulled shit like this--in the prelude to Brooks’ end--Hux had been able to repay it rather quickly. On a world where his face is plastered _ somewhere _, though, the likelihood that he could charm any ancient hermits into compliance is considerably diminished.

And Ren can handle that part too, honestly, as long as he stays conscious, which he seems likely to do, with Hux stowedback here with the saddlebag, clinging helpless--

A sudden swerve of the speeder pulls Hux out of his head, dials up his pulse. Hux pinches Ren almost involuntarily, before he’s even noticed the slump of his shoulders. 

Ren’s back immediately straightens, and he pulls the bike back into formation. He stays far too rigid in Hux’s grasp, like he’s in physical training, practicing his posture--_ stack the shoulders above the ribs, above the hips, now breathe. _Overcompensating.

_ Fuck. _

Hux clears his throat to project over the clatter of the motivator, then leans in until his lips all but brush the tip of Ren’s ear, sticking awkwardly out of his wind-tangled hair. “_ Are you falling asleep?” _

Ren’s loud, too. _ “No.” _

He’s such a fucking liar. There’s no shame in it, not really, after today. 

But perhaps that gave him enough of a scare to keep him alert until they can at least reach some semblance of cover. Going into one of the villages is out of the question now, given how poorly it went at the fuel station.

Ren could probably get a motel room somewhere, if not for Hux’s face. He could be all but incognito, and warm all night. Not that he particularly deserves that, but still. It’s a debt Hux now owes.

(He got cold following Snoke’s orders on Starkiller, but that doesn’t constitute a sacrifice.)

Hux bites his lip against any further commentary, and to distract himself with the spark of pain. He’s chapped, terribly so, and peeling. He gnaws at the dead skin for lack of anything more productive to do. He’s tasting a hint of copper when the bike lists again.

_ “Hey!” _he tries, though it comes out strangled and shrill. It’s probably the sharp nudge that Ren responds to, anyway.

The bike jerks forward perilously, and tilts left at what feels like a thirty-degree angle, before Ren manages to straighten the handlebars. The motion itself isn’t nauseating, but Hux still feels like he’s swallowed several rocks.

Ren, of course, doesn’t apologize. Says nothing, in fact, just tenses up again.

_ “We really ought to stop soon,” _Hux yells into Ren’s ear, over-enunciating.

That gets a response out of him. _ “Stop where? In somebody’s field?” _

Hux resists the suicidal urge to let go for the exclusive purpose of rubbing his temples. He settles for a sigh that’s lost below the bike’s clunking.

_ “We’ll have to hit tree cover again soon. We can... _ camp _ there. I suppose.” _

It takes Ren a moment to reply, and for an unnerving heartbeat, it seems like he’s nodded again. But he speaks up before Hux can shake him.

“_ Okay.” _

Supportive as always.

_ “Should I keep you awake until then.” _

_ “Not by yelling in my ear.” _

Inflection is impossible when they’re both speaking as loudly as they can, so Hux only imagines humor in Ren’s tone. He doesn’t realize this, though, until he’s almost smiled.

***

Gauging time by the stars is not at all a thing this late. 

Therefore, when a patch of forest had finally appeared ahead, Hux could only assess that it had been fewer than five hours, as the sky was still pure indigo behind the constellations, no break of light at the horizon.

Now, _ however long _ later, it’s still gotten no lighter out, and the clearing they’ve found to make camp in is lit infernally by the speeder’s single orange headlight and the bloodshine of Ren’s lightsaber.

_ “Stand back _,” he’d told Hux, within minutes of arriving, having heaped a pile of damp sticks and fallen needles about two meters from the nearest tree.

Back Hux had stood, and watched--as he would a particularly violent explosion--Ren ignite the saber, tip it downward, and drive the point into the little stack of kindling. Nothing had happened, and Ren had cursed. He’s still cursing now, two tries later, as if positively confounded by the turn of events.

Hux is fucking tired of hearing it. (And also fucking tired, full stop, but that isn’t the point.)

“It’s _ wet _,” he says, picking idly at the bark of the tree he’s leaning against. “No amount of chemically generated heat is going to fix that.”

“I know it’s fucking wet.” Ren’s tone is somewhere between a growl and a sneer. “I’m trying to work around it.”

“Good gods.” Hux tilts his head back, closes his eyes. “If you think holding that thing over the kindling is going to dry it instantly…”

“Shut up.”

_ “Shut up _?”

“I have to concentrate,” Ren returns, and to be fair, he looks like he’s attempting it. Brows drawn, jaw clenched, muscles rigid. Saber beam, though, retracted. Before Hux can ask him to clarify, he volunteers, “I used to do this often. Out of practice.”

Hux is tired, but the implications of this still click into place, activating a survival instinct hardwired into his brain.

“Don’t tell me you’re… Trying to.” A piece of bark snaps off under Hux’s fingers. “With your mind.”

“I told you, I’m good at this.”

“At setting things on fire?” Hux pops his lips. “That, I’ve never doubted. It’s simply that--”

“I need to _ think _, damn it,” Ren grits out in reply.

If he’s so damn good at it, it shouldn’t take this level of focus and aggravation, but Hux knows better than to point that out to the man with the lightsaber.

And well, Ren_ is _exhausted.

To Ren’s credit, he had only drifted once on the speeder since their last exchange, but it was still one time to many. Fortunately, he didn’t have to be prompted to slow down, once they were perhaps a kilometer into the forest, nor to pull several meters off the lane to seek optimal cover.

It didn’t take long to find a spot where the towering conifers at least don’t grow quite so closely together. 

There’s room to park the speeder against a tree, at any rate, and for both Hux and Ren to stretch out to their full heights.

That is, if Ren doesn’t fucking set the whole wood on fire.

Hux should start backing toward the lane, away from what’s about to become ground zero, but what good would it do. If the fireball doesn’t catch him, the cold certainly will. It’s a suffocating thought, that he’s _ trapped. _

That Ren--Kylo fucking Ren, who has given him very few reasons to trust him over the past seven years, and next to none in the past three months--is his only lifeline.

It’ll be better in the morning, Hux knows. It always is. He just needs to sleep, he just needs--

_ “Fuck _yes.”

Ren’s outburst draws him back to the immediate crisis--Ren’s outburst, of course, and the flare of orange-yellow light that accompanies it. A swelling flame runs impossibly along the edge of Ren’s largest stick, a particularly damp one covered in mildew.

Ren powers off the saber with a prominent crackle, then hangs it back on his belt. He gives Hux a look that’s smug, yes, but not just that. There’s something else there--a question, almost--as if he’s seeking approval.

“Impressive,” Hux allows.

Ren nods at that, and the smugness dominates, overwhelming that flicker of..._ something. _Vulnerability, perhaps, but it’s gone now. He cocks his head toward the burgeoning campfire. 

“Come warm up.”

***

Ren built the fire near enough to the trees that Hux can comfortably lean against one while remaining within range of the heat. Ren himself is sitting hunched to his right, facing the direction of the speeder lane.

Hux has just finished a ration bar, and is sipping at one of the water bottles, wincing. The water’s gotten so cold--between the fuel station conservator and the frigid air--that every swallow burns. But there’s no way around hydration, so he keeps drinking, gulping hard and sharp. Thinking, while Ren picks at a ration bar.

There’s never been a time when they had all that much to say to each other, aside from the occasional tactical disagreement or sarcastic one-liner. Snoke made sure of that, and so has Ren’s, well..._ demeanor. _

The last time they were stuck alone together for any period of time, before Starkiller was even complete, conversation was limited to the direly practical. It should be no different now--nothing has changed but Ren’s position--but still, the silence is all but palpable.

Ren appears blissfully ignorant of it, but it sinks somewhere between Hux’s ribs--the zillo-beast in the room: his own uselessness. And what he owes Ren.

Hux clears his throat, wrings his gloves between his hands. He needs to say this. His dignity requires that he acknowledge it, that he not take what’s so obviously a gift, or at least an inexplicable indulgence, for granted.

“Supreme Leader?” he manages, tearing his gaze from the fire and toward Ren, who looks up at the same time, wearing an amused expression cast unsettling by the dancing shadows of the flames.

Ren snorts. “Really?”

What the hell is he talking about.

Before Hux can find politer phrasing to voice this, though, Ren continues, sounding oddly pensive, “You’re still using that. No one’s going to write you up out here.”

“Well--” Hux starts, then sputters out. He can’t just go back to _ Ren _ like nothing has passed between them, like they’re co-commanders probing for each other’s last nerve, six years ago, three years ago, three _ months _ago, even.

Ren always does this. Interrupts, just to throw him off. Watch him flounder, however briefly.

Hux can’t allow him the victory. Quickly, he opts to forego any form of address. It isn’t like there’s anyone else he could possibly be speaking to. 

“I’m well aware that today would have been easier for you without my--”

Ren cuts him off again, even as his eyes flick back to the fire. “You don’t have to--”

“Yes, I do.”

The flames whisper noisily, and Hux’s pride hangs in the air. A part of Hux waits for the dressing-down, the mockery. None comes.

After a moment, Ren simply says, “You can take first watch.”

Something--no, _ everything _ about that rankles: that Ren knows enough of him or his mind to guess what was coming, that Ren won’t even allow him the dignity of acknowledging he’s a burden.

If Ren knows him so well, he also knows nothing makes Hux feel smaller. 

(He’s sweat and bled and clawed and killed for three decades to feel larger than life. For the past three months, Ren has been uniquely able to shrink him down to size.)

But Ren’s done one thing right: give him a job. Let him compensate for it, however feebly.

And Ren _ is _clearly exhausted. Never mind the marrow-chilling list of the speeder back on the lane, his eyes are half-hooded in the firelight, posture relaxed. He’s been chewing idly on the end of his ration bar, but not making much progress.

If this has been a long day for Hux--who’s done nothing but hold on and get rescued--Ren’s got to feel like he’s aged ten years since the _ Upsilon _-class landed this morning.

Hux crumples up his own empty wrapper and tosses it back into the mirk of the saddlebag while Ren manages a few more bites. Finally, he gives up and rolls down the open end of the wrapper, as if that will keep the untouched half fresh overnight. 

“We have enough rations for you to finish that,” Hux points out, leaning back against the tree trunk behind him. 

“I know.” Ren looks at it awkwardly, the diminished wrapper shining small between his massive palms. He passes it back and forth between them like he has no idea what to do with it, until Hux takes pity on him and holds out his hand.

He’d press him to finish it, given how he prefers his pilots well-nourished and fully alert, but he’s in no position to nag. He’ll probably be starving in the morning and eat three of them.

Ren presses the bar into Hux’s hand, and Hux tucks it into the saddlebag. Wordlessly, Ren scoots a safe distance away from the fire and tugs his cloak off over his head again, spreading it on the earth in a tidy pallet, with the clear precision that only extensive practice breeds. 

_ Snoke, _ Hux wonders, _ or the Jedi. _He doesn’t dare ask, especially not as Ren curls up on it, the garment wide enough that he can fold half of it over his body with his legs pulled toward his chest. 

He doesn’t look small, exactly, just desperately uncomfortable, like real people get when curled up under a thin swath of fabric on cold, hard ground in the middle of nowhere. This far from the fire, the light softens his features, as opposed to how the shadows sharpened them.

“I’ll let it go down,” Hux says, managing to inflect the slightest question as he nods toward the blaze.

Ren tugs at the cloak and pillows his cheek on his bicep. “Okay,” he says.

***

It doesn’t take long for exhaustion to catch up with Hux, pulling at his eyelids, tugging his head toward his chest. He keeps waking up as he nods, leaving indefinite gaps of lost time.

With his datapad far too great a risk to even power on, Hux’s only chronometer is the ebbing campfire. He’s planning to wake Ren once the flames themselves have burned down. Ren can watch the embers flicker out.

But as the secondsminuteshours drag by, it’s less and less certain that Hux will make it that long. He goes without sleep often enough, but it’s got to have been fifteen years since he had to _ make _himself stay up. It usually just happens. And he always has work to occupy him, rather than this...blankness.

(The blankness, of course, and Kylo Ren’s soft breathing.)

Hux’s head lolls forward again, and he blinks back the black static. Pinches his wrist. Rubs his face.

_ Focus. _

_ Get it together. _

If there’s one thing Hux has, it’s control over his body. 

He takes out a water bottle and pours a few precious drops on his gloves in an attempt to dilute the fuel stench clinging to the leather.

He gets up and walks a semi-circle around the fire, careful that his shadow doesn’t pass over Ren, startle him awake.

He quietly takes inventory of the saddlebag’s contents.

He mentally checks his calculations from earlier today regarding the size of the province and the capacity of the speeder. Or tries to.

The numbers spin and tangle together, bobbing in and out of a black morass populated by the strange half-dreams on the edge of sleep. 

Target practice in a dark room that’s supposed to be the Academy’s firing range. He keeps missing. Missing. Missing.

_ “Armitage, I need a cup of caf in my quarters.” _

_ “General, I need—“ _

Hux’s eyes jerk open one last time, but drift back down almost immediately as he surrenders to sleep.

***

Hux awakens gradually, to the dull ache of poorly angled joints against solid earth. The pain registers first--before he’s quite opened his eyes. Before he realizes that--

Fuck.

It’s somehow morning.

He didn’t wake Ren as he promised. 

Hells, he didn’t even stay upright. He’s managed to slump down from the tree trunk and roll alarmingly close to Ren’s sleeping form. Ren’s cloak is partially over Hux’s legs, though Ren is curled under most of it. 

Nothing in the galaxy could make Kylo Ren look small, but he’s at least flexible--knees still drawn tight enough to his chest that he fits under the cloak with room to spare. Hux gently extricates his legs from the corner of it, but can’t quite bring himself to sit up.

The throbbing crick in his spine is one reason for his paralysis. An inelegant twist on an unforgiving surface is doing his usual pain no favors. It’ll just spike if he tries to move. (Though it will improve once he pops it, like always.)

The other reason he can’t move is Ren himself. 

Hux hasn’t seen him in daylight since Crait, and even that didn’t quite count, with the glare off the mineral plains and the planet’s white-dwarf excuse for a sun. 

The morning light here is far more forgiving. It filters greenish and organic through the conifer branches to catch in his hair, which is apparently dark-brown. (The ships’ fluorescents always render it inky.) The suns smooth away his frown lines, too, soften even his scar, still pink and puckered after all these months. 

His side rises and falls under the cloak, his full lips part with soft exhales, and one would never guess he’d slaughtered hundreds by hand. 

None of that matters, though, because this is the opportunity Hux has been waiting six months for. 

That was the last time he saw Ren unconscious, vulnerable, curled on his side. On the _ Supremacy _, kilometers above Crait, and Hux’s hand had been halfway to his blaster--halfway to victory---when the universe had gotten in the way. (The universe has a way of doing that.)

Now, however, it’s giving him a second chance. 

It would be all too easy. Hux slept with his blaster still in his coat pocket, and provided Ren didn’t startle like before, it would be quick. No chance of missing from this angle. Point blank.

But Ren looks young in the sunlight, almost vulnerable in sleep, and moreover, Hux wouldn’t be lying here, wide-eyed and whole, to contemplate assassination if not for Ren himself. Ren, who left bruises all over him like graffiti--Ren, who climbed to the throne of the galaxy on the backs of Hux and his technologists. 

But also Ren who shielded him, long ago, from the fiery disintegration of a mid-size shuttle. He claimed he hadn’t meant to. (He had, all the same.)

And Ren, who could have far more easily left him behind in the capital. Let the Resistance take care of him. Tragic accident. (Hux knows all about those.) Ren, who would have killed for him last night. Who blazed out of the fuel station’s store like Hux was something worth the panic.

Ren, of course, who can actually pilot a speeder bike. Whom Hux needs, if he has any hope of getting out of this province. 

Hux shifts up carefully, making sure not to disturb Ren’s curled form, but Ren stirs anyway. He blinks a bit slower than he did on the _ Supremacy _, and there’s sleep in the corners of his eyes now, not ash.

“Good morning,” Hux says, popping his back. That’s better.

“Morning.” Ren sounds a bit slurry, but he shuffles more or less vertical, rubbing at his eyes. Once apparently satisfied with their condition, his gaze darts to the speeder, as if registering that it hasn’t been guarded all night. “How did you sleep?”

“Better than I should have, apparently.”

Ren purses his lips for a moment, then pulls the cloak over his head again, wraps it around his shoulders. “I wouldn’t have picked this spot if it weren’t safe.”

“I’m aware,” Hux replies, tearing his eyes from Ren’s face to snag the saddlebag from under the tree trunk. “I’m certain you can sense danger in your sleep, and therefore have no need of a mere mortal for a watchman.” He rummages in the bag to extract a fresh bar for himself and Ren’s half-finished one, along with two bottles of water.

Ren takes his own before Hux has fully extended his hand, starts unrolling the cellophane with an obnoxious crackle. “You’d be surprised,” he says, thoughtfully, around a bite.

Hux downs a sip of water before opening his own bar. “You have a way of that, Supreme Leader.”

Ren doesn’t respond to that, but his lip tugs upward between bites, in something like a smile.

Hux gnaws on his bar in silence, tugging his coat tighter around his shoulders when a cloud passes in front of the suns, throwing shadow across the clearing. A cold breeze stirs the needles overhead. The wind promises no warmer a day than yesterday, and for all the sunlight is welcome, it’s terribly dangerous.

“You know this weather is a double bind,” he says, because someone has to.

Ren looks up at him from under a curtain of still sleep-mussed hair. “It’s a clear day.”

“Yes, so we’ll be entirely exposed to passing shuttles.” Hux wads up his wrapper, shoves it back into the saddlebag. “And if it does cloud over, we’ll have rain or snow to look forward to.”

“So what alternative are you proposing, General?”

Hux has to physically refrain from rolling his eyes. “No alternative, Supreme Leader, simply-- A realistic outlook.”

Ren swallows the last of his bar. “If you’re concerned by the road, we don’t have to use it.”

“Yes, because starving to death while lost in the Chelloan wilderness is far superior to capture by the Resistance on the open road.”

“Isn’t it?” Ren looks at him keenly, as if it isn’t a rhetorical question.

Hux doesn’t dignify it with a response. “You know what I mean.”

“Last time it wasn’t so terrible. Being lost in the wilderness.” Ren keeps that same expectant look.

“Well, we weren’t fleeing a Resistance-occupied province last time.”

Last time had been terrible, though for entirely different reasons. Hux had thought he’d suffered some kind of internal injury, the way his stomach clenched up whenever Ren’s mask came off. The way he’d looked with it on, standing over Hux, kilotons of debris flying back with a flick of his wrist.

Last time would have been utter disaster, if not for both their quick thinking.

Now, though, Hux has little to contribute besides logistical realities. 

Ren doesn’t either, apparently. “The Force would guide me, if we left the road. I’m sure of it.”

“I’m not.”

Vitriol seeps into Ren’s voice. “I’m still waiting on your better alternative.”

“It isn’t that I question your abilities,” Hux lies, though he means the rest: “It’s a matter of logistics. If we left the city with a half-tank of fuel, and used a quarter-tank before the station last night, we’ll have to refuel at least once before we reach the border. We can’t count on finding a station ‘in the wilderness.’”

“It won’t matter if we’re captured before it runs out.”

“No, but I’d rather be sure it didn’t. Unless the Force can also power an empty speed--”

Hux is cut off by the worst possible sound: the whine of a sublight shuttle, far overhead. It’s visible briefly between the branches: a shining silver blur crossing past the suns. Undoubtedly scanning for life forms.

Ren mutters what sounds like _ fuck _, but stays stock still. Hux mirrors him--it’s too late now to run for cover. The trees had better be enough.

After a seemingly infinite moment, the noise of the shuttle fades. Another breeze ruffles the conifers, a sigh of relief in tandem with the way Hux’s shoulders relax. Ren’s, too.

Ren turns back to Hux with an almost arrogant toss of his head. “They’d have spotted us on the road.”

“All right,” Hux says, carefully. Compromise is a delicate art. “So let’s keep to the edges of it. Veer off as much as possible, keep any cover we can find. But we _ cannot _lose sight of it.”

Ren looks down, picks up his ration bar wrapper, and folds it in half, as if deep in contemplation. Finally, he curls his fist around it, nods, then stands. “You do realize I’m piloting this thing.”

_ “You _do realize my advice makes sense.”

Another strange, almost amused expression crosses Ren’s face at that, brief but mesmerizing: a flicker in his eyes, a twitch of his lip. His silence, though, is acquiescence. Standing over Hux, he inexplicably offers his hand.

Hux doesn’t need it. Ren knows this.

Hux plants both hands on the ground, pushes himself off and upright.

***

Without yesterday’s adrenaline, the ride is even duller. Fallow fields blur into evergreen forests blur into deciduous forests, all budding leaves on naked limbs. The country is brown, and the blue sky of early morning soon fades into gray-white. 

The wind is as harsh, as searching, as yesterday’s too, though harder on Hux’s mussed hair. The pomade hasn’t entirely come out, but it’s getting there, stray locks of hair whipping around Hux’s forehead. It’s no good trying to bat them away, not with the imperative to keep both hands on Ren’s waist at all times to avoid flying off the damn bike.

Not that it’s necessarily traveling at dangerous speeds. The thing is probably getting a solid 50 kilometers per hour. Ren’s apparently taken to heart the fact that another fuel station may not appear today, and has decided against maxing out the bike’s capacity. Wise, of course, but still. Half the time it feels like the speeder’s nose is cutting through viscous bacta.

Hux clings tighter to Ren, especially as the wind picks up and the cloud cover increases. Hux isn’t often close to normal people, of course, but Ren still seems to emit more heat than he ought. 

He’s also alarmingly...solid, which Hux didn’t properly notice yesterday, too concerned with the prospect of imminent death. There’s quite a bit of substance under the robes and regalia; all his training has apparently paid off for something.

Hux is cataloguing this when Ren veers suddenly deeper into the woods to their right. A glance up and over his shoulder shows another of the Resistance shuttles above. This one is flying slightly lower than the first, and less than directly overhead.

Hux doesn’t ask how Ren was aware of it, still not close enough to be heard over the roar of the speeder, not even when he’s parked it under a tree at least ten meters from the lane, and they’re crouching beneath it, sipping water and waiting for it to pass.

Hux keeps his eyes up once they’re back beside the lane, though, a welcome distraction from the solid planes of Ren’s body. The next two shuttles, he notices before Ren does, squeezes his shoulder to alert him to turn off.

It does less good over fields than under trees, but the lane is also visible longer from from flat ground than between tree trunks, allowing Ren to cross fairly deeply onto private property. It’s still too early in the season for anyone to be in the fields besides the occasional rusty monitor droid.

By the time they’re back under tree cover after two such spans, sunset’s orange rays are poking out from the cloudy horizon in front of them. A kilometer or so in, Ren looks briefly over his shoulder, quirking an eyebrow in the obvious question of whether Hux would like to stop. 

Hux nods, and Ren starts braking. Within minutes, the speeder is parked against the thick trunk of a flyleaf tree. Hux’s feet are on the ground almost as soon as Ren powers it off. He stretches as subtly as possible, popping both knees as his joints relax. 

Ren slouches against the tree trunk without sitting down, tipping his chin back to study the bare branches above. Hux takes longer than necessary with the saddlebag to avoid the ground, too, but he is at least hungry.

“Are you going to eat standing up?” he asks, unwilling to settle at Ren’s feet. He holds up the saddlebag.

Ren doesn’t acknowledge the question, but at least sinks to the ground, crossing his legs. “What’s on the menu?”

“I don’t know.” Hux opens the bag, rummages through until he finds the last individually-wrapped chunk of bantha jerky and a water bottle, then passes the bag to Ren. “You were the one that stole our selection.”

Ren takes a moment digging as well, then finally pulls out a bag of dried jogan fruit and one of the bars he had this morning, along with his own water. 

Hux devours the jerky far too quickly, in total silence, before washing down, entirely emptying the bottle. There are still two more unopened ones in the bag, but still. It’ll become a problem tomorrow.

“Out of curiosity,” Hux says, tucking the empty bottle back in the bag and extracting a bar of his own, “can you detect toxins with the Force?”

He catches Ren mid-bite, and he doesn’t respond until he’s swallowed. “If you’re really planning to poison me out here--”

Hux huffs a sigh. “No, I meant in reference to--”

“Native flora,” Ren supplies, an unmistakable amused gleam in his eyes. “Sometimes.”

Fantastic to know the Supreme Leader is taking this predicament seriously.

“Also water,” Hux says. “I’m unsure if we’re far enough from the mines that fresh water would be safe to drink.”

“Again, sometimes.” Ren takes an unsparing gulp of his own bottle. “You should keep an eye out for wells on the farms tomorrow.”

He has a point, yet: “There could be many reasons that there are no wells besides the water being unsafe to drink.”

“Yes, but unless you have a better--” Ren starts.

“So you can’t detect trace amounts of baradium using the Force,” Hux summarizes, tearing open his bar. It smells vaguely of honey, the surface sticky. 

“No,” Ren says, sharp almost defensive, “the Force doesn’t work like that. You should know.”

Hux has no way of knowing, his primary exposure to the Force being Ren himself and the occasional abuse from Snoke. But this sounds like a sore spot--the sheer fact, apparently, of not being omnipotent and omniscient. Under normal circumstances, he would prod it, test Ren’s limits.

These circumstances, though, are sufficiently bizarre. He needs Ren happy and fully functional.

“That’s fine,” he says, with all the smooth patience he uses on new recruits. “Just cataloguing the resources I’m working with here.”

Ren is chewing again, doesn’t respond. 

Hux seizes the opportunity. “We should probably go another few hours tonight. Perhaps clear this stretch of woods and stop in the next.”

“Yeah,” Ren says, swallowing, “either that or try to find something like a roof before it starts snowing.”

“Snowing?” Hux echoes. The temperature has dropped even since they sat down, but Hux hasn’t fully registered the implications. “So that you _ can _ sense?”

“It’s easier.” Ren wads up his bar wrapper and tosses it into the bag. “Different number of molecules than looking for the baradium.”

“Alright, then.” Hux has no idea how to engage with that, ignores it in favor of the next pressing question: “How long before it starts up?”

“I can’t give you an exact--”

Hux cuts him off, worry curling somewhere around his diaphragm. “An estimate, then.”

“Sometime overnight,” Ren says, dangerously curt. “Probably.”

Excellent. Just fucking _ fantastic. _ There’s absolutely no guarantee they’ll find _ anything _like a roof, particularly after dark, particularly with the lane getting increasingly barren with each passing kilometer.

“You are aware there’s no possible way this is going to end well,” Hux says, hoping to be contradicted. 

Ren’s lips part as if he’s about to snap in reply, but his gaze suddenly leaves Hux’s face, flashing with something more alarming than anger. He’s focused on the shadows to his left, the ones that stretch west into pitch blackness between the tree-trunks.

Something like a glacier drops into the pit of Hux’s stomach. “What is it?” he hisses.

“There’s something,” Ren says, without looking at him. “There’s-- We’re not alone.”

Hux’s hand strays toward his blaster. “Can you offer anything more specif--”

He’s cut off by a sound that melts the glacier in his gut just enough to send the icy runoff through his veins: the high, unmistakable wail of a canid. A pack call. Distant, but far too close for comfort or even sanity.

“We should go,” he breathes. “Now.”


	3. Chapter 3

Hux is half-expecting Ren to respond with some bullshit about how the Force will empower him to fend them all off--whatever they are, they sound smaller than norwoods--but he doesn’t. Just gets wordlessly to his feet.

Hux quickly follows suit, even the crunching of dead leaves underfoot suddenly loud in his ears. The roar of the speeder’s motivator will doubtless carry, though hopefully it will frighten the creatures off, rather than attract them. The bike certainly doesn’t sound like  _ prey. _

Still, he crosses back over to it on the balls of his feet. He meets Ren’s amused but wordless glance with a glare before slinging the saddlebag over the seat and settling behind him.

The bike sputters to life, and is soon loud enough to drown out any natural sounds.

Hux keeps a sharper eye to make up for it, though it’s dark enough now that he can make out little outside the narrow beam of the speeder’s headlight. The gleam of eyes will hopefully be an exception.

Ren weaves between tree trunks as full night falls. The pinpricks of stars between the naked tree branches are too high to give much light, and the speeder lane, which must still be some fifteen meters west of the treeline, is invisible, engulfed by creeping shadows.

It’s warmer under the trees than it was last night in the open air, but gooseflesh still rises on Hux’s skin between the breeze and his frayed nerves. Pressing as close to Ren’s warmth as he can, his muscles are taut, but rocked periodically by shivers, palpable even with the bike’s vibrations. He keeps his gaze squarely on the surrounding trees, soon more distraction than legitimate lookout.

When a sudden flare of red cuts through the trees from above, he flinches so hard he nearly lets go of Ren. Over the speeder’s shoddy muffler resounds the low whine of a sublight engine. The red light is moving, striping methodically across the trees, high enough still that the beam is thin. Avoidable, if only Ren would--

Actually look in front of him, rather than up toward the Resistance shuttle with a stricken, furious expression. 

Hux regains enough presence of mind to raise a hand and pinch his shoulder-- _ hard-- _ in time for him to veer away from the nearest tree and start braking instead. 

Within moments, the speeder’s at a full stop, and Hux is clambering off of it behind Ren, to huddle in the long shadow of a flyleaf. This should be enough cover, if the shuttle is as high as it seems to be.

Still, Hux’s pulse hammers in his ears, and he flinches yet again with every new sweep of the beam. It drenches the trees in front of them in bloodshine, shows out the naked black branches in an unnatural series of snapshots.

At least Ren is in no better state, as jumpy as Hux, if not worse. Hux knows his quads are solid, but his thigh is unnaturally tight where it presses against Hux’s own, like a wound spring or a tripwire. He must be unused to feeling so powerless. He hasn’t done any cowering since Snoke, and back then, only before Snoke.

Hux might begrudge him that--that sense of security--if adrenaline weren’t singing through his veins, if his brain weren’t spinning in circles attempting to determine the shuttle’s model by the apparent wattage of its searchlights. Assess whether it’s equipped for airstrikes.

Stupid way to go--the Starkiller and the New Republic’s one-time hope--under a beam of red light. 

Slowly, however, the searchlights pass, growing sparser and sparser until the woods are pitch-dark again.

Hux isn’t sure he’s been breathing until they’re out of sight. He releases a shaky, pent-up sigh, and flexes his trembling fingers to still them as the adrenaline drains. 

“Shall we?” he says, breathier than he intends, and puts his hands on his knees to make to stand.

In response, Ren extends an arm in front of him, reflex-fast. “Stay still.”

In the dark to Hux’s right, a leaf crunches.

_ “Shit,”  _ he breathes.

Ren doesn’t even bother shushing him, just stands to his feet in one fluid motion. He ignites his saber in time for three snarling canids to step into its light. 

The creatures look mangy, famished with winter--all matted tan fur and jutting ribs. Sharp incisors snaggle onto thin jowls. Hux’s hand is on his blaster before he even thinks of it--before he thinks to stand--but the nearest of the beast lunges before he can draw it.

The saber, though, is faster. With a single stroke, red light hisses through the canid’s throat. The creature’s final snarl fizzles into a choked sound before its corpse falls to the ground, smoking. 

Hux barely has time to meet Ren’s eyes-- _ doesn’t  _ have time to mutter ‘thank you’--before two more creatures charge forward at once. Hux fires before he’s even on his feet. With the poor angle, the bolt hits the nearest of the canids in the leg, hobbling it long enough for Hux to scramble upright and finish it with a shot between the eyes. It collapses, green blood trickling from the end of its snout.

It’s only replaced by another just like it, though--and another, and another. Three carcasses already surround Ren’s feet, but it’s nothing like a dent. Between the light, the noise, and the scent of bipedal prey, they’ve apparently drawn a whole pack.

Beyond the circle of red light, there’s the gleam of eyes, snuffled respiration, and the crunch of leaves under heavy paws. It’s impossible to get a head-count, when you can’t see half the adversary, and the other has you in _its_ sights.

Hux fires at the next creature and the next, almost indiscriminately, but his right side and back are completely exposed. The speeder--and possible escape--are only a few meters away, but turning their backs on the creatures long enough to get to it would spell certain death.

They’re so fucked.

He pulls the trigger again, all the same, this time fending off a canid to his right. The bolt whines home, and the creature crumples with a yelp. A sharp snarl and the rustle of leaping paws calls his attention back to the fight ahead of him. 

Too late.

The creature’s already sprung, snout mere centimeters from Hux’s chest, when it’s suddenly forced backward. Its spine hits the nearest tree trunk, and it collapses, motionless.

_ “Fuck,”  _ Hux murmurs, breathless and suddenly unsteady, for all his finger remains in the trigger well. Only Ren--

A glance over at him shows his saber is fully occupied with the creature at the point of it, but his gaze is on the fallen one. Before completely reverting, it falls on Hux, something relieved in the droop at the corners of his eyes, the way his lips have parted.

Diverting the creature’s attention like that, using his saber and his less concrete abilities at once, was a risk Hux doesn’t have time to contemplate.

In Ren’s moment of distraction, another canid has circled onto his left, looks rabid, looks poised--

“ _ Ren! _ ” Hux nods the other direction while Ren’s still looking at him, then fires again.

In Hux’s periphery, the saber arcs through Ren’s current attacker, then through the secondary one, in a single fluid motion. 

Hux doesn’t have time to appreciate the technique.

Would to fuck he had a rifle. 

Would to fuck he had a  _ thermal detonator. _

He’s aiming and firing as quickly as he can, but there’s no way to spray bolts with a pistol.

And he has no idea how many more rounds his blaster’s power pack has left in it.

More and more of the canids are coming at Hux from the right, forcing him to divide his attention between two points of attack--and pivot his overall stance. He fires, once, twice, lets the combat rush pulse through him.

It’s a roar in his ears, a current in his trigger finger. A numbing agent, of sorts, where soot and green blood on his gloves and face would usually make him want to crawl out of his skin. Survival is all that matters: the next round and its intended target.

He doesn’t realize he’s been backing toward Ren--away from the advancing pack--until he elbows something solid. A glance over his shoulder shows the saber’s flicker. This close, Ren’s breathing is clearly labored.

So is his own, he realizes, as another carcass thumps to the undergrowth behind him, and--there are no more in front of him. 

He whirls toward Ren, surveying the damage before meeting his eyes. A solid fifteen canids lie dead around them, another few whining in their final agonies. Only ten of them show any sign of trauma.

“Are you alright?” Ren’s all but wheezing, alarmingly pale, though the saber’s light is never flattering.

“Yes, I-- Yes.” Hux sounds little better himself. “How many of those things did you kill with...with your mind?”  _ For me _ , he can’t face adding.

“I don’t know.” Ren suddenly looks past Hux, into the shadows.

Another howl splits the night air.

“Come on.” Ren powers off the saber and heads toward the speeder.

Hux grabs the saddlebag--fortunately undamaged but for a singed strap--and jogs behind Ren to board the bike. 

It seems to take longer than usual to come online, groaning and sputtering like a beacon with every crank of the ignition. The first pair of eyes appears at the edge of the clearing.

“Can’t you  _ hurry _ ?” Hux hisses as a second joins it, and a third.

“I  _ am _ .”

“There are  _ more _ .”

“So shoot them,” Ren grits out, giving the ignition another turn.

Hux is about to protest that that will mean letting go of Ren’s waist--unwise when the bike is about to start  _ moving _ \--but two canids are already charging the bike. He extracts his blaster for long enough to down one of them, but damn near drops it when the speeder’s motivator splutters into the hum of full operational capacity.

Ren accelerates before Hux can get both hands on his waist, for what little good it does with the trees this thick around them. 

Hux fumbles his blaster back into his coat and holds on, less against the speed than the rising terror that the clunky bike barely maneuvers faster around the trees than the creatures after them, and that there’s no path that isn’t at least partially through the ring the pack’s made.

One snaps at the speeder as Ren brakes for a particularly tight turn, and Hux squeezes his eyes shut against all better sense. He opens them again, though, when Ren accelerates once more. 

The bike vibrates so hard this has to be its maximum capacity. The smell of burning fuel permeates Hux’s senses. But the creature’s claws graze harmlessly off the bike’s chassis as it speeds out of range. 

Hux’s muscles temporarily relax, but tense again when Ren leans over his shoulder, shouts over the motivator, “Don’t look behind us.”

Hux, therefore, must look.

_ Shit. _

He doesn’t quite wish he hadn’t (it’s  _ always  _ better to know), but what he sees shoots a fresh burst of helpless adrenaline through his veins.

The canids are fast.

Damn fast.

And the speeder is old and cantankerous, made slower by the dense treeline. They haven’t quite caught up with the bike, but they’re close, snarling and swatting at the rear chassis, apparently too famished to regard the noise.

What if they catch up, come in from the sides, decide to start  _ leaping _ ? He can’t get his blaster out without letting go of Ren and toppling off the bike directly into at least three ravening maws.

The creatures are close enough to hear their growls above the din of the speeder, that their teeth and glassy eyes refract the taillights: red and red and red. 

They just keep getting closer.

He’s going to die like this. Shredded to bits by wild animals beside Kylo fucking Ren, no Resistance aid necessary, just the galaxy’s final checkmate against--

_ Ren won’t let that happen. _

The thought comes unbidden, startling, almost comforting, in the face of the basest, most carnal of endings: that Hux has a raw force of nature on his side, as well.

(Always has, perhaps.)

Only a particularly dizzying turn--dodging a thick tree trunk--pulls Hux’s attention away from certain death and the Supreme Leader’s few redeeming qualities.

“Fuck, Ren,” he intones, close enough to Ren’s ear that he has to hear it. But it comes out breathy and startled, rather than scolding.

Ren doesn’t react. His shoulders stay bent, every muscle tense, focused. Like he is on the few occasions Hux has seen him in battle. On the holo footage he can never help but be impressed by.

The scrape of claws on the rusty chassis momentarily draws Hux’s gaze, but Ren accelerates again, and something flashes in Hux’s periphery. He turns fully ahead and sees-- _ it.  _

Hope.

A gap in the treeline, and beyond it, a few meters of farmland between the wood and the dark silhouette of a storehouse.

Hux grits his teeth as Ren makes another tight turn to line them up with the break in the trees, wind whipping cold in his face as the shelter of the forest thins. 

Two of the canids growl at once. Hux turns around long enough to see one leap, jaws snapping, but Ren accelerates again-- _ they’re not going to have any fucking fuel left after this, they’re not going to have any fucking fuel- _ -but it doesn’t matter because the blast from the tailpipe knocks them back enough to give the speeder the lead it needs.

It doesn’t stop them, though.

Hux is still looking back as the speeder leaves the cover of the trees, hardly registers the fat, wet snowflakes suddenly pelting down. (Even better.) The canids clearly have no qualms about leaving their habitat to hunt, and death by live ingestion will hurt no less in the open air.

Hux i’s all but digging his fingers into Ren’s midsection. His pulse thuds in his ears. 

The bike gains speed across a narrow, flat expanse of fallow field. The creatures keep coming, but their pace lags against the sudden change in velocity

The looming shadow of the storehouse expands in the corner of his eye, lit faintly yellow by the speeder’s headlights. Hux risks a glance ahead, and well. Ren’s barreling directly toward a rusty set of doors that look ready to fall off their tracks.

Ren gives no warning before lifting his left hand from the handlebar, raising it toward the doors in a clear attempt at parting them. The speeder lists slightly right, and Hux’s stomach swoops.

They’re not going to come open, not without effort, and the bike’s going to tip, and the creatures are only two meters behind, and--

With a screech louder than the speeder’s motivator, the doors part, as if flung apart by two massive, invisible, and careful hands. Inside, a pair of yellowish lampdisks flicker to life automatically, somehow welcoming in the bitter cold, and with certain death behind them. 

The bike lost some speed with Ren’s one-handed maneuver, but it regains balance, at least, when Ren sets his hand back down. The creatures are running, snarling, breathless.

Within seconds, the speeder crosses the storehouse’s threshold, the rickety doors slamming shut behind with a rusty squeal and metallic clang that echoes under the duraluminum roof.

Ren brakes. Hard. The speeder’s nose dips briefly, skidding across packed earth floor before he readjusts--in time to stop before a parallel set of doors in the storehouse’s north wall.

Hux lets out a ragged breath as the speeder powers off, heart pounding. He stumbles off the speeder behind Ren, sensation returning to chilled limbs and rigid muscles.

Ren turns to face scratches and snarls outside the door they entered from, but the panels don’t budge. 

Hux doesn’t turn. Can’t. He’s lightheaded for one, but the waning adrenaline is irrelevant.

So is the storehouse’s high metal ceiling and racks of empty shelving. So is the snow, and so is the pack, and so is the fact that they’re hundreds of kilometers from civilization, in a barn, in a blizzard, and have narrowly missed being eaten alive.

The only  _ remotely  _ pertinent thing in the universe right now is the slow, almost hysterical smile creeping across Ren’s features. 

“Holy shit,” Ren breathes.

He’s pale, and shaking harder than Hux. Melting snowflakes star his cloak and wet his hair. He reaches up to brush a few clinging wisps back from his forehead, and his fingers are unsteady.

“Holy shit,” he repeats, like he can’t believe he’s alive, like he’s about to burst out laughing. It’s quite possibly the most beautiful thing Hux has ever seen. 

“The Force,” Ren goes on, in that same unsteady, almost incredulous tone, “I’ve never-- That was...”

“Incredible,” Hux supplies, and realizes too late that Ren’s smile has spread. He takes a step closer to Ren, and lets out a huff of laughter, because his heart rate is still up, and there’s something magnetic about Ren when he’s like this, reeling in the afterglow of what he is. 

The extra step puts them chest-to-chest, eye-to-eye, damn near nose-to-nose. Ren’s lips are mere centimeters from Hux’s, full and wet and somehow still pouting.

“Incredible,” Ren echoes, with a certain mesmerizing smugness. His eyes are soft, though.

“Yes,” Hux says, “yes, that’s… you--” He can’t finish. 

Ren’s gaze is too much, and his mouth is too much, and his body has  _ been  _ too much. Hux closes the minute gap between them, crushes his lips against Ren’s. 

Ren makes a startled sound in the back of his throat, and Hux pulls back before Ren can push him away, heat prickling his face. ( _ Stupid, fucking stupid, Ren doesn’t want--) _

“I apologize,” Hux tells the packed-earth floor. “I--”

“Don’t.” Ren’s fingertips brush his cheek. “Please.” 

It’s Ren who surges forward this time, and he’s a fucking messy kisser. His nose bumps against Hux’s, and their teeth clack briefly. Ren’s mouth tastes like perspiration and the melting snow. Hux is sure he’s the same. Hux doesn’t  _ care. _

This fixes nothing. This  _ restores  _ nothing. (There was nothing to restore, in the first place.) But something wound tight inside him is finally unspooling, and the tightness he’s been carrying between his ribs has dissipated into warmth.

One of his hands is in Ren’s hair, and the other cups his cheek. Ren’s combing the last of the pomade out of Hux’s hair with his fingers. It feels incredible.

Hux sucks experimentally on Ren’s plush lower lip before parting Ren’s lips with his tongue. Ren’s tongue presses against his own, and he traces as much of his mouth as he can before pulling back, breathing hard.

When he meets Ren’s eyes, the pupils are dilated, blown dark with what must be desire, searching Hux’s face. Hux is close enough to feel Ren’s breath against his skin, as ragged as Hux’s own. Ren’s teeth worry his swollen lower lip.

“I’ve wanted--” he murmurs, after a moment. “I never thought-- Not now. I thought it was too late.”

On impulse, Hux cups his cheek again. “Is that why?” he asks, and means Ren’s hand on his arm in the city, the dead shooter at the station and the dead canids in the woods. The dead  _ norwood _ , long ago, and the pieces of shuttle that fell away from him.

“Always,” Ren says, and his eyes are wet. “Always.”

Hux could stop to process this, could stop to  _ think _ , but he’s exhausted and unraveling, and the warmth in his chest is spreading slowly down, pooling below his waist. 

He kisses Ren again, as hard as before, fisting a hand into Ren’s hair. He’s hardly aware he’s walked Ren the few steps backward into the nearest set of doors until Ren’s back hits the duraluminum with a soft thud. 

Hux pulls back, and liquid still rings Ren’s eyes, even as they darken with something like hunger. Need. Years of it, pent up to bursting, straining like a levee during monsoon season. 

Or perhaps he’s just seeing himself reflected back, recontextualizing the past seven years of contention, and finding  _ this.  _ Of course. This.

He can’t think.

Can’t allow it.

He drops his hands to Ren’s hips, reaches under the slit of Ren’s tunic to get at his waistband. He’s warm, even through his layers and Hux’s gloves. Hardening too, to Hux’s satisfaction.

“Hux--” His voice is rough. “--what are you--”

Hux doesn’t look up. “Shall I stop?”

“ _ No _ .” Ren hisses an inhale. “Don’t.”

Hux makes quick work of Ren’s fly, takes out his swelling cock as gently as possible with the gloves he hasn’t bothered shedding. 

Ren shudders at the friction, nearly giving Hux pause, but the sheer  _ size  _ of Ren wipes all coherent thought from his mind as his cock springs free, dark red and semi-hard, curling toward his stomach. A bead of precome glistens at the crown.

_ “Fuck _ ,” Hux breathes.

It’s been ten years since he did this with anyone, much less someone this size, and he isn’t sure how he’ll manage, but he has to. Wants to.

“‘What?” Ren murmurs.

Hux doesn’t answer, sinks gracelessly to his knees. He’s taken the head of Ren’s cock before he can overthink. He swirls his tongue around it, savoring the salt of Ren’s precome, taking the circumference.

Ren exhales a somewhat belated  _ oh _ , then it’s a litany of  _ fuck  _ and  _ Hux _ , and profanities in a language Hux doesn’t recognize, before Hux pulls off, risks a glance upward.

Ren’s gorgeous from this angle, from this  _ close _ , when for once Hux wants nothing more than to kneel in front of him.

“Alright?” he asks, but it comes out more teasing than anything else. Ren’s interest is obvious. (For once.)

“Keep going,” Ren says, and bites his lip.

Hux does, licking a partial stripe up the underside of Ren’s cock, which hardens further under the attention, before taking him in his mouth again. He won’t be able to take all of him, especially not with Ren still mostly clothed, limiting his access, but he’ll do what he can.

Hux takes him slow, inch by inch, moving his tongue as he can. Ren’s hands find their way into his hair, still gloved, digging into his scalp at first, rather than threading through, like he’s holding on. 

Hux is dimly aware of his own arousal, upping his pulse, gathering tense and hot in his groin. He can’t focus on it now, though. Ren easily dominates his concentration, hips bucking as Hux pushes past his gag reflex, the head of Ren’s cock striking the back of his throat with involuntary force.

The strangled sound Ren makes as he does so is unbearably hot, somehow, and the  _ fuck  _ that follows it is hoarse, ragged. Hux hollows his cheeks, swallows, taking as much as he can. His nose brushes the fabric of Ren’s jodhpurs.

He inhales, swallowing again.

Ren’s hips lurch again forward at the slight motion. His grip on Hux’s hair tightens.

“Hux, I--” 

He comes down Hux’s throat with a sharp sound and a tortured exhale. It’s a lot, tastes strong, and Hux nearly gags again. He schools himself in time, though, swallows all of it down, then pulls off, Ren’s cock softening between his lips.

Hux sucks in an inhale, throat raw, and looks back up at Ren. He’s leaning bonelessly against the wall, chest heaving, wet cock flaccid against the leg of his jodhpurs. A smile, though, tugs at the corner of his mouth. 

“Well?” Hux says, or tries to say--it comes out harsh and cracked.

“Good,” Ren replies, less than steady himself. “Good. That was… Thank you.” There’s something uncertain in the thanks, though, as if he’s falling back on some conditioned politeness. Perhaps it’s been a while for him, too.

Hux wants to dismiss him, but given the current quality of his voice, Hux just nods and clears his throat. He needs a drink, to wash down the taste and smooth over the rawness, but there’s no spigot in the walls--must be baradium traces after all, some corner of his mind notes--and the saddlebag is. Far. Especially given the bulge between his legs. 

_ Fuck. _

It’ll go away. Just give it time. Over the years he’s developed a talent for riding these things out.

“Shit, Hux.”

Another glance up meets Ren’s eyes, as he’s tucking his cock away.

“What?” Hux says. “I’m alright.”

“Let me,” Ren replies. There’s a hint of question in that too, for all he doesn’t hesitate to kneel across from Hux, knees touching.

“There’s no need to--” Hux starts, but Ren is already shucking his gloves. 

“I want to,” he says, holding Hux’s gaze. He spreads one massive hand across Hux’s thigh, leans in. “Let me.”

There’s no Force in it, nothing imposed on Hux’s will. Merely something on offer--Ren himself, or at least his full attention. At least the same hand spanning Hux’s quad.

A fresh wave of arousal washes through Hux at the thought, cock throbbing against the seams of his briefs and jodhpurs.

Hux swallows, nods, croaks out, “Please.”

He feels his face color at the weakness of his voice, but hopefully the lights in here are poor enough to mask it. And Ren isn’t looking at his face anyway, long, thick fingers already folding back Hux’s tunic, fidgeting with his fly.

Hux bites his lip against a cry as Ren takes him out, the unexpectedly gentle contact shooting sparks through his veins. He can’t help leaning into the touch, into the warmth of Ren’s hand.

“I know,” Ren murmurs as he wraps his fingers around Hux’s cock, delicate and unimpressive compared to his own, but thick and fully hard. He strokes the pad of his thumb up the sensitive underside to get at the precome pearling at the tip, then meets Hux’s eyes, and licks his thumb. 

A part of Hux could get off on that sight alone, those soft lips parting around that massive thumb, shining with the beginnings of his own release. He fights down the base urge, though, the part of him that’s already breaking.

He has no idea what this is, but he’d like to prolong it.

“Tell me what’s okay,” Ren murmurs as he takes Hux’s length in hand again. He strokes again, once, twice, before moving up and down in earnest. 

“It’s-- good,” Hux manages, as more precome leaks onto Ren’s hand.

“Good,” Ren murmurs, sounding distant, distracted, but his gaze is focused, intent. The most powerful man in the galaxy, and all he wants to do is get Hux’s off.

He’s damn close to succeeding, too, closer than Hux would prefer. The friction of his calloused skin against Hux’s sensitivity, the way his fingers nearly envelop Hux’s cock, his gentle, practiced rhythm--and then there’s the fact that it’s  _ him _ , with his hair falling in his face, his ears poking out, his thighs massive across from Hux’s.

Hux’s orgasm unfurls in slow motion, graying the edges of his vision, spreading warmth from the base of his spine to his groin. He isn’t sure if he cries out, but his lips part, and he’s gasping for breath as he comes down, spilling hot and sticky into Ren’s grip.

It’s disgusting, of course, but Ren doesn’t seem to mind, just pumps him through it, murmuring again about how alright it is.

He doesn’t let go until Hux’s cock is softening in his grip; his hand pulls away filthy.

“I’m sorry.” Hux spreads a hand on the floor, making to get up. “The water’s still on the bike. Let me--”

That strange half-smile toys with the corners of Ren’s lips. Less blissed out now than typically smug, but whatever. Let him enjoy this. A conquest, maybe. He’s earned it. (And Hux can’t remember the last time he came like that.)

“It’s fine,” Ren says, and maintains eye contact as he lifts his hand to his lips, drags his tongue through Hux’s spend. “Really.”

Hux is too drained to be immediately aroused, but he files the mental image away for future usage. He’ll be jerking off alone in his sonic on the  _ Finalizer  _ soon enough. He’ll need something stimulating.

He puts his cock away and gets up, still. 

As he crosses back to the speeder to retrieve the saddlebag, the distance between himself and Ren feels unnatural.

***

It’s remedied soon, however. Within what must be a standard half hour, they’ve drunk, washed as best as possible, and found the control panel for the overhead lights. 

Hux lies curled into Ren in the dark, allowing more of Ren’s cloak on top of him than wound up there last night. As the last remains of adrenaline and arousal drain from his bloodstream, he’s grown cold, and doesn’t mind the closeness. 

Hux’s face is all but pressed into Ren’s throat, their legs tangled together under the tattered black fabric. Ren’s arm is strong around his shoulders, pulling him close; his breath is warm on his neck. It’s almost enough to make him forget the ache in his muscles, the way his bones dig into the unforgiving earth floor. 

Judging by Ren’s breathing, he’s still awake; Hux can’t see his own hand, much less Ren’s face, in this pitch-dark. He has no idea what to say. If he should say anything, about the day, about whatever the hell this was.

But Ren’s voice cuts through his doubt, low, almost tender. “Warm enough?” 

Hux nods, then remembers Ren can’t see it, can only feel it as a strange nuzzling. “I suppose,” he says, sleepily.

Ren rubs his shoulder, in something Hux doesn’t want to call a caress. “Okay,” he says. “Good night.”

Hux doesn’t bother echoing it, sleep already washing over him.

The morning breaks in, soft and white, through a pair of low windows Hux hadn’t noticed last night. It’s even colder than it was when they curled up on the floor, and Hux shivers, reflexively pulling his greatcoat tighter around his stiff muscles. 

With it, though, comes a loose handful of rough black fabric, and  _ oh.  _ Ren’s already gotten up. That explains the drop in temperature.

Hux shuffles semi-vertical as much as possible, keeping both garments over him, and scans the empty storehouse for Ren. Just when Hux is starting to worry, he emerges from behind a chipped door across the floor. It swings back enough to reveal a darkened ‘fresher. 

Ren’s face looks noticeably cleaner as he crosses back toward Hux and the speeder, though apparently nothing could be done for the oil in his hair. 

Hux clears his throat, which takes enough effort for him to realize he’s  _ parched _ . “They have running water?”

Ren’s stopped by the bike to rummage in the saddlebag, but looks up at the sound of Hux’s voice. “Yeah. I didn’t risk drinking it, though.” He ducks his head long enough to root out two bottles of water. He takes the few steps that place him standing over Hux. He holds one out. “Also good morning.”

“Morning,” Hux allows as he takes it, avoiding Ren’s gaze--which is...a new impulse apparently linked to the fact that he had his mouth around Ren’s cock less than eight hours ago. 

Less exhausted and no longer sex-sloppy, the reality of what happened last night hits him like an ion missile. Ren saved his life, again, like he does. Hux wound up on his knees--voluntarily--and then. Ren’s hand. The tender, careful way he’d gripped Hux’s cock, coaxed an orgasm with gentle, firm touches.

If Ren weren’t looking down at him with such an oddly soft, almost sheepish expression, he’d write it all off as a wet dream produced by stress and fatigue. Hux has no idea where to begin.

Luckily, Ren’s gaze strays toward the windows. “It’s still snowing.”

“Shit.” As if they aren’t already low on supplies, and it weren’t polar-cap cold in here, and they did something last night better suited to die in the roar of the motivator than hang over them in here like a silent specter. “When is it going to stop?”

Ren’s expression clouds over again. That’s familiar. “I told you I can’t predict that.”

“Today?”

“How many multi-cycle snowstorms have you encountered?” Ren takes a swig of water.

“Starkiller,” Hux returns, aware how petulant he sounds. Ren always brings out something unrefined in him, even before--

Ren just shrugs, unwilling to cede the point. “But even once it’s stopped, the bike isn’t equipped to repulse off a quarter-meter of snow.”

“You truly picked the shittiest possible vehicle to steal,” Hux says, with more vitriol than the words merit. (That’s also familiar.) Before Ren can respond with a defense he doesn’t actually want to hear, he continues, “Perhaps it’ll warm up later in the day like it has been and melt some of it.”

“Hopefully,” Ren says, in the galaxy’s least hopeful tone, and sinks down to sit beside Hux, back against the wall.

The silence stretches thin between them while Hux drains half his water bottle in a series of inelegant gulps. Ren’s sipping at his, staring straight through the bike at the opposite wall.

“Would you like your cloak back?” Hux asks after far too long, more for the sake of saying something than any actual inclination to give it up.

“It’s fine,” Ren says, but Hux slips it off his legs anyway as he stands. 

The stretch feels good, even if his joints are burning. He runs a hand through his hair and crosses over to the ‘fresher. He needs it. He isn’t hiding.

***

A trip to the ‘fresher, maximum efforts in the grimy mirror, and a glance out the window to confirm that yes, there really is a quarter-meter of snow on the ground, and Ren isn’t just being sadistic, Hux is gnawing on a half-frozen ration bar on the same wall, next to Ren. 

In silence, because that’s what they do, apparently. 

Hux actively wracks his brain for innocent topics of conversation, but can’t land on anything that doesn’t sound like an active cover-up for what needs to be said. Even a simple  _ thank-you _ will lead deeper (will lead to halfway down Hux’s throat, and to things he can’t face).

A warm weight on his thigh pulls him out of his thoughts. 

“Okay?”

Ren’s spread his massive hand high on Hux’s leg, fingers all but entirely spanning it. His index finger gently strokes the tender spot facing inward, and heat is pooling in Hux’s groin before he can stop it, or even admonish himself that this is apparently all it takes.

“Yes,” Hux breathes. “Yes. Carry on.”

Ren lets out a low, almost shy laugh at that, and keeps stroking, wordlessly. With every touch, Hux expects Ren to go for his fly, or at least the bulge of his semi, but he doesn’t. 

Just keeps stroking, while Hux is getting harder, and his legs are angled so that Hux can’t make out whether he’s affected for the dark fabric. He’d better be. He’d better, otherwise--

“Stand up,” Ren says, low and controlled.

“Stand up?”

“I’d rather not lie on the ground to blow you.”

***

Ren’s mouth, it turns out, is as skilled as his hands, and it’s impossible not to touch him after.

The morning denigrates from there.

It’s warm, anyway, and better than thinking.

  
  
  
  
  



	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See endnotes for a mild content warning re: addressing the events of TLJ.

The icicles hanging from the eaves of the storehouse began dripping about two hours ago, the suns finally breaking their way through a thick canopy of clouds. The snow had stopped, and the temperature--apparently--had risen. 

From the window near the slide-locked front doors, Hux estimates about five centimeters of snow remain on the ground, enough that even this bike’s shitty repulsors shouldn’t be affected.

“We should probably get moving,” he says over his shoulder.

Ren’s sitting against the wall, several meters back from Hux and the entrance. A shelf hangs a bit above him, and his head is tipped back against the duraluminum siding, eyes shut, knees drawn halfway to his chest. Still blissed out, probably (or at least sufficiently warm), from the post-lunch handjob Hux shouldn’t have enjoyed giving him.

Hux walls off a surge of interest at the thought. Stay back. Stay hidden. Where it’s always been.

Whatever they’ve done since they arrived under this roof for lack of alternative stimuli will have no impact on things back on the  _ Finalizer.  _

It can’t.

But it’s still like something out of a wet dream. Twelve hours ago, Ren’s cock was hardly even real--just a humiliating figment of some imagined universe where Hux got everything he wanted. Now he’s touched it three times. 

And Ren has touched him, which is...absolutely mortifying, really. Not the fact that it happened, but the fact that Hux  _ permitted  _ it. Ren hadn’t deigned to touch him on the  _ Supremacy _ , on Crait--why should he get to now?

(Lock Armitage Hux in a cold room with a beautiful man, and watch his self-control turn tail, steal a ship, and fly itself into a gravity well, apparently.)

( _ Disgusting. Weak.) _

Hux tenses his jaw, buries his nails in the heel of his hand. Ren isn’t responding, because of course he isn’t.

“Ren,” he repeats, louder, terser.

“Yeah?” 

There’s a hollow tap against the metal behind him, and Hux turns in time to see Ren stand up. He’s hugging his cloak around his body, like some damn kind of security blanket. He has no idea how ridiculous it makes him look (or how small). He crosses the floor to stand beside Hux at the window.

Hux focuses resolutely on the icicles, the single drop pearling at the end, then plinking into the slush below. “More snowfall is looking unlikely,” he explains. “We ought not waste any more time.”

“You consider coming four times a waste?” 

Fuck him. How can Hux  _ not  _ look when that stupid smug smile is tugging at Ren’s voice, let alone his mouth? 

A glance shows Ren’s watching the icicles.

“If the promise of future orgasms keeps us trapped in this barn indefinitely, yes.”

“But you do support future orgasms elsewhere,” Ren replies, almost airily.

Hux bites his lip. “I’ll discuss it elsewhere.”

“I’ll get the bike.”

***

Hux has nearly finished repacking the saddlebag when the first rev sputters out.

Ren’s muttered  _ “fuck”  _ echoes in the mostly-metal room. Hux echoes it under his breath, but knows better than to interrupt.

By the fifth, however, Hux is all but standing by, and the agonized whirrings of the engine have died down to faint hums whenever Ren turns the ignition.

_ “Damnit _ ,” he hisses at it, knuckles white around the handlebars. “Come on, you piece of shit.”

Ren cranks it again. 

No sound at all.

Hux’s stomach is somewhere around the floor. They have to have the bike. The bike is absolutely necessary if they want to leave the province in a reasonable timeframe. If they want to be able to outrun Resistance patrols. If they want to remain alive, at liberty, and in control of the Order and the galaxy.

One shoddy speeder bike, and a whole war for nothing. 

Hux swallows back the rising panic.

“Is it the battery pack or the fuel?” he asks, crossing two meters of packed earth to hover over Ren’s shoulder.

Ren grunts, pulls his hands quickly off the bike as if to fling it away in disgust. There’s a faint flush high on his cheekbones, a bit of perspiration plastering wisps of hair to his brow. He swipes them out of the way.

“Fucking thing’s older than either of us.”

Hux knows this. They both do. “Battery pack or the--”

“Battery pack,” Ren interrupts. He bites his lower lip for a moment. “It’s fine.”

“It’s  _ fine _ ?” Hux echoes, though his mind is already racing. Cataloguing what’s on hand. That rusty groundcrawler toward the back of the storehouse. Clearly runs on something petroleum-based, there may be some cables around for its battery, Hux just needs--

“I’ll just…” Ren is saying, perfectly even, perfectly balanced. Like a sane and rational human being. He stretches a hand toward the body of the bike. “...jolt it.”

Hux can only manage a feeble scoff. “You’ll what?”

“Jolt it,” Ren repeats, with an air of shrugging. “The Force is just energy. It shouldn’t have a problem manipulating the ions in the--”

Hux’s life flashes prematurely before his eyes.

“You will do no such thing.”

“Won’t I?” Ren replies, a sudden perilous edge to his tone. 

The threat of it is fine by Hux. Let Ren go on and kill him. It’ll be less painful than the explosion that’s about to ensue.

“No, you will not,” Hux replies, enunciating every syllable, like he’s dressing down a derelict lieutenant, “because on a machine this small, the battery pack is alarmingly close to the fuel tank. If  _ the Force  _ strays one  _ hair  _ left or right, you and I are reduced to carbon particulate.”

“So I won’t miss.” 

And lo, he’s blase again.

Hux inhales through his nose, smiles thinly. “Forgive me my reasons for doubting that.”

“I suppose you have a better alternative.” The shadow is back in Ren’s voice, his brows knit barely closer together.

“There may be some cables in here for that groundcrawler,” Hux explains, nodding toward it. “We should at least attempt to jump it that way before risking--”

“Why?” 

The worst part is that he actually sounds curious.

Hux has no idea how to respond to that without simply repeating the words ‘carbon particulate’ in an even more ominous tone.

Fortunately, Ren keeps going: “There’s no need to bother with that when I-- when the Force can take care of it instantly.”

“Must I reiterate?”

“You doubt my abilities,” Ren says, barely softer than an accusation.

Hux backtracks as much as safely possible. “I don’t doubt your abilities, I just doubt--”

“Me.”

Fuck  _ backtrack _ . Try 360-degree revolution.

“I never said--” Hux starts.

“You didn’t fucking have to.”

Hux imagines phantom pain in his ribs. Thinks of the mottling, the ache. Indigo. Parts of his skin were fucking  _ indigo _ .

“Yet who could blame me if I did?” he snarls back, before he can stop himself.

There’s a ripple in Ren’s expression--a flash of the eyes, a quiver of the lip--but it passes like a thunder-squall, leaving something blank behind. “Get out,” he says, only the dimmest flare of anger in it, of Force.

The knot in Hux’s stomach tightens, but he manages to scoff. “You aren’t going to throw me out and abandon me here, not after--”

“You don’t trust me,” Ren interrupts. “Get out, then. Clear the range of the explosion.”

“So I can just watch you and the bike blow up, then be stranded in the middle of a wheat field until I freeze to death or am arrested?” 

Ren looks down at the glinting handlebars, curls his wrist as if to flex it. “That isn’t going to happen.”

He’s absolutely insufferable.

“I’d rather not risk it,” Hux says.

It’s considerably more sophisticated than  _ don’t get yourself killed now; we’ve only just started having sex. _

“Then get out so I can concentrate,” Ren snaps back. “My chances are much better without you doubting over my shoulder.”

“So now when you blow yourself up, it’s going to be my fault.”

“No,” Ren says, hard on the syllable, but softening after. “I don’t need it from you, too.”

The audacity of him. Invoking Snoke and - if he knew it - one of their few shared life experiences: the unshakeable burden of inadequacy. Wasted potential.

And Ren. Does seem to have control over things, if last night is anything to go by (this morning, too)--the tenderness of his voice, his lips, his touch, like Hux was a fragile object, broken once before, and priceless once restored. 

_ Is this good? That okay for you?  _ The precision of it.

And above it all, that indescribable  _ hum.  _ Like a second pulse, somewhere in Hux’s marrow, Ren’s own need and hunger and pleasure coursing through him, absorbing his own and feeding off of it. Sending it back to him in just the right dose.

Just the right dose, perhaps, to leave him addicted, but that isn’t the point.

The point is that he can control himself when he wants to, when it means something, when Hux needs him to. ( _ The bolt he stopped two nights ago, and how long it hung suspended _ .) Hux needs him to, right now.

He thins his lips, dips his head. Surrender, of a sort. 

“Go ahead,” Hux murmurs, but takes a step backward, almost involuntarily. “I’ll be right here.”

The smile that tugs up the corner of Ren’s mouth would almost be a decent final sight.

But never mind that, he straddles the bike again, and bends down to the work. His right hand is on the throttle, where it has been, but his left brushes the chassis now, just below his thigh. 

He squeezes the throttle. 

Nothing. 

As expected.

Ren doesn’t let go, though, just closes his eyes, leaning slightly left. His teeth work into his lower lip, and his brow furrows.

Every alarm in Hux’s brain is screeching  _ step back again, step back, get out,  _ but he knows better than to move. To make a sound. He waits.

Frownlines pucker around Ren’s eyes, concentration etched into his skin. He doesn’t move, either.

And doesn’t move.

And doesn’t move.

Perhaps he’s gone into some Force-trance, from which he’ll never return. Perhaps he’s simply fallen asleep. Perhaps Hux is distracting him, and Hux should just leave like he said, because he hasn’t even started. Perhaps--

The sudden sputter of the engine interrupts the thought. A grin creeps across Ren’s face before his eyes have even opened. He squeezes the throttle again before doing so and sitting upright.

Hux releases his fists, joints and palms aching. Apparently, he’s had them clenched. Anxious over nothing, for all that’s not unusual.

The engine revs, with perhaps less than the usual rickety agony. The purr of it echoes in the metal room, sets the whole place buzzing like the Force itself.

Ren throws a glance over his shoulder, calls above the bike, “Coming?”

Hux hoists the saddlebag over his shoulder.

***

It’s perhaps around 1500 hours, by the season and the suns, when they set out, and the whole district seems to be dripping.

The snow under the bike’s repulsors has degenerated into translucent piles of slush, icy lattices visible above muddy earth. The speeder lane is somewhat less than visible, but they haven’t been following it too precisely, anyway.

The road remains open, which is fine--lower probability of encountering deadly wildlife--and the skies, at least, are clear. The air temperature, too, is warmer than it has been, but the wind from the speeder still raises gooseflesh under Hux’s greatcoat.

Ren’s warm, though, and it’s shamefully easier to cling to him.

The suns have begun to sink into the cloud cover on the horizon, and the temperature to drop, when they hit the next thatch of woods.

As the shadows grow longer, Hux squeezes Ren’s shoulder to signal for a break.

***

“Fuel,” Ren says, once they’re well off the road, rolling a water bottle between his hands. “We’ll need to stop before nightfall.”

Hux tips his head against the tree trunk he’s sitting under. The bike leans against it, and Ren paces a small circuit in front of Hux’s feet.

“Any indication that there  _ will  _ be a fuel stop before nightfall?” The last distance marker read 250 kilometers, and didn’t name a nearby town. 

“Based on a sign from yesterday, there whoud be a village at 300,” Ren says, pausing to uncap his bottle and down a sip. 

“Good.” Hux stands, stretches. “Shouldn’t be too dark by then.”

***

It is full dark by the time the trees--and cover--end. It was cloudy enough by sunset that most of the stars are hidden, but a few bright ones prick the northern sky, cold and unhelpful. 

Without sunlight, it must be well below freezing again, as well. Even inside his gloves, Hux’s hands sting with the beginnings of frostbite. It’s all he can do not to press his face against Ren’s shoulder as cover from the wind.

The air smells wet, too, that distinct crispness that forebodes snow. Hux knows it better even than Arkanian monsoons--Starkiller made sure of that.

He’s about to squeeze Ren’s shoulder again, warn him, when the acetylene lights of a fuel station sign appear on the horizon. He holds on.

Once they’ve finally stopped under the station’s duraluminum canopy, Ren powers down the bike and steps off, his shadow long in the wavering light. Hux disembarks behind him, chafing his arms. 

He follows Ren’s gaze to the fuel station’s attached shop: a bright-pink O P E N sign blinks in the window.

“Damnit,” Ren murmurs—it would, of course have been easier to break in. But it’s far from late enough, despite the stars, if the place closes at all.

Hux shivers. He can feel the buzzing of the overhead bulbs in his teeth. “Will this be a problem?”

Ren shakes his head, then half-shrugs, half-yanks his cloak off over his head, installing it around Hux’s shoulders. “Don’t get recognized.”

A flare of warmth that has nothing to do with the sudden third layer washes over Hux. Hopefully the shadows hide the heat in his face.

Ren’s stalked toward the shop, hand straying to his belt and his saber, before Hux can get the cloak around his neck or the cowl up. Joints and gloves stiff alike, he fumbles it on, then bends to remove the fuel cap. He selects the  _ hard credits  _ option on the pump, then removes the nozzle to fill the tank. He resolutely does not look toward the shop. 

For all they’ve fit better together physically on the bike, Ren’s otherwise been curt and stiff all day. It could be lingering soreness over Hux’s doubt this morning. (If he thinks Hux is going to  _ apologize _ , he can get the hell in line. There’s a lovely spot for him right behind the Hosnian System.) Or it could just be the road itself—the cold, the toll of sitting hunched all day, the gnawing edge of hunger.

Hux, of course, has reciprocated the gruffness. (What’s he supposed to say,  _ here, Supreme Leader, let me suck you off on the side of the road _ ?) 

At any rate, their conversations have remained strictly matter-of-fact, strictly survival-based, for the past four hours. Who knows, Hux’s lack of faith may have overwritten everything that happened last night. Ren’s fickle like that, and not worth—

The fuel pump clicks off—full tank—even as a door creaks open just out of Hux’s line of sight. He turns toward the sound and finds Ren leaning halfway out it. Even in the dim light, his smirk is unmistakable. His beckon is a mere incline of the head.

“Just a moment,” Hux calls across the lot. He scrambles to recap the fuel tank before grabbing the saddlebag all but  _ jogging  _ into the shop. Into the warmth.

He blinks a bit, once over the threshold, adjusting to the first industrial lighting he’s been under in two days. He hasn’t spent this long outdoors—or in run-down sheds—since the cadet camps on Aqamra. 

He runs a hand through his hair as Ren sidles up to him from beside the shop’s counter. 

Everything in that direction looks...shockingly intact. Ren’s gloves show none of his saber’s telltale singe marks. He looks devastatingly collected, self-satisfied. He swipes an oily lock of hair away from his forehead, cranes his neck toward the skinny Bith behind the counter. They’re not blinking much, but they look alive, at least.

“They’re going to let us have anything we want, then forget we were ever here,” Ren says low, but with a hint of an almost boyish pride, excitement bubbling under his tone. 

“I’m going to let—“ the Bith starts to repeat, but Ren cuts them off with an outstretched hand. 

The air crackles faintly, like an itch just under Hux’s skin (where Ren has always been). 

Ren gestures to the shelves and conservators before them. “Take your spoils.”

Hux hides his smile behind his glove, then opens the saddlebag. 

He grabs water first, plenty of it, then, a few vac-sealed bags of dried jogan fruit. Dried bantha meat, electrolyte powder for the water, a travel-sized medpac kit, lube (just in case Ren pulls his attitude together). 

He stops, however, in front of the ration bars shelf. Decides to extend an olive branch. “Ren?”

Ren looks up from the middle of the vac-sealed dried foods aisle that Hux just combed.

“Ration bars,” Hux goes on, “do you prefer chocolate, vanilla, or cloudberry?”

“It all tastes the same. Get some of everything.”

Hux bends, scoops up as many vanilla bars as he can fit in a handful. “What else are you getting?” he asks.

It takes Ren a moment to answer. “Depends.”

“On what?”

Ren’s gaze flicks down to the MREs on the shelf in front of him. “Where we’re spending the night.”

“I wasn’t aware there were options.” Hux raises his eyebrows.

“I think one of them might be death by hypothermia,” Ren returns. “It’s not done snowing.”

Hux throws a glance around the shop. “I’m certain they sell blankets or—“

Ren cuts him off: “The second option is the town.”

Hux scoffs, rubs his temple. “The town,” he repeats, sardonically.

“This a remote area—there’s not even a comms system in this station. You stay out of sight, I convince someone to give me a room.” Ren stops abruptly, taking a breath. “Provided they have some kind of motel or hostel up there.”

Hux thins his lips. It’s a gamble, but perhaps no more dangerous of one than another night outside. Welcoming, unlocked storehouses are not guaranteed. 

And, well. He could use a real bed. (Fine, he could  _ use  _ Ren in a real bed. Perhaps.) 

But the chances of being caught…

Ren speaks up before Hux can articulate a decision. “You do trust me.”

Ren’s leaning over the shelf, a bag of galla seeds in hand.

“Unfortunately,” Hux says, “I do.”

***

“I see you talked them out of their best.” 

Within ninety standard minutes, Hux has crossed the threshold of the dingiest room he has ever had the displeasure to behold. It isn’t like he’s stayed in many hotels--and hells, he wasn’t expecting one of the five-sun establishments on Canto Bight--but this is an unfortunate low.

The gray carpet under his boots is stained and threadbare, thatched backing showing through between uncanny brown blotches. A low double bed dominates the rest of the room, swathed in a washed-out comforter that might have once been beige. 

Olive-green light-blocking curtains, looking somewhat velveteen, cover a narrow window beside the bed. To Hux’s right is a pitiful excuse for a galley area (a scratched caf maker on a counter beside a moldy sink).

To his left is a darkened doorway that must lead to whatever horrors await in the ‘fresher.

“What were you expecting?” Ren replies, with the slightest defensive edge. “Nowhere town, halfway to the planet’s pole. Hotel where smuggling someone in after check-in wouldn’t raise suspicions.”

“I know.”

Hux stood under the motel’s eaves for a solid fifteen minutes in the cold, borrowing Ren’s cloak again. At least two speeders unloaded passengers that were whisked quickly into guests-only entrances. No one looked twice at him. (Ren has a point.)

“I suppose it’s only for one night,” Hux allows, stepping forward and setting down the saddlebag.

It’s warm in here compared to outdoors, but the radiator under the window doesn’t feel or sound active. Whatever. Hux will worry about it when the cold catches up with him.

He sheds Ren’s cloak and holds it out to him. Ren, however, has ducked into the ‘fresher.

“Fuck,” resounds through the open door.

“‘Fuck’ what?” 

“You’ve got to fucking see this.”

Hux folds the cloak over his arm, then sets it on the counter. The thing is filthy in this light, mud-spattered and grass-stained, like the rest of Hux’s clothes.

“Do I  _ want  _ to see it?” he calls back.

“You’ll have to eventually.”

Point taken, Hux turns to follow him. The ‘fresher is actually somewhat roomy, at least relative to the ensuite. However, it makes up for it in rust rings, threadbare linens, and a conspicuous spot where the wall has been peeled to plaster. Dust coats the floor where the tiles are breaking up.

Hux clucks his tongue. Not only are his clothes filthy, but his skin, too. The yellow bulb in the ‘fresher brings out the grime on his hands, the oil in Ren’s hair. He’s certain his face is just as haggard and smudged.

“At least it has a water shower?” he offers, eyeing the rusty sonic head at the end of the stall and the massive rain-shower spigot in the center of the ceiling above it.

“Did you want to use it?” Ren returns, in a tone that suggests he isn’t personally considering it.

“It can’t be more toxic than this--” Hux brushes at his greatcoat sleeve. “--filth.”

Ren snorts. “Enjoy that. The clerk said not to expect more than five minutes of hot water.”

“And what will you do,” Hux says, “if I--”

“Use the sonic.”

He has to be joking. He brushed a lock of hair out of his face thirty minutes ago, and it hasn’t moved.

“On this?” Hux gestures to all of both of them. “Use the sonic for clothes, not two days of dirt on your person.”

Ren shrugs. “It’s better than cold water.”

And yes, but-- 

The solution falls out of Hux’s mouth before he can cross-examine it.

“Then use it with me.”

His wording is shit, even more presumptive than the lube at the bottom of the saddlebag. Hux isn’t certain  _ he _ wants that, much less that Ren would.

Ren, however, blinks once, the barest flush glowing under the grime coating his face. “If you’re sure you don’t--”

Hux cuts him off. “I spent the formative years of my life using communal showers. I couldn’t possibly care less.” (Only the second sentence is a lie.) 

“Now,” Ren says, flat, like he’s getting his head around it.

“Given that I’d rather not worsen the condition of that bed by sitting on it to wait,” Hux replies, shrugging off the greatcoat. “Clothes first, though. We can use the sonic for that one at a time.”

Ren’s gaze follows Hux’s hands to his belt, and he doesn’t respond. 

“Your cloak is out on the counter,” Hux prompts, as the belt clatters to the cracked tile.

Ren swallows visibly. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He’s stepped out before Hux can get his tunic off, shutting the door behind him, like it matters.

He takes far longer than he should to retrieve the cloak. Funny way for his modesty to show--he was interested enough in Hux’s dick last night. Regardless, he’ll have to get over it.

In shirtsleeves and briefs, Hux sticks his head out the door. Nearly rolls his eyes. Ren’s loitering by the counter, one hand in the bag of galla seeds.

“If you come in here, I can do yours in the sonic, too.”

Ren looks up, but his gaze falls to Hux’s bare and skinny arms, rather than his face. He’ll have to get over this, too. “I’m coming,” he says, too quickly, and snags the cloak.

“Just put it in the pile,” Hux says as Ren enters the ‘fresher. He points to the growing stack of his own muddied black garments. 

Ren drops it, but doesn’t look up. 

Hux’s legs, too? For fuck’s sake.

“Well?” Hux’s hands go to the hem of his undershirt, and he nods to Ren. He finishes undressing with his back to him, then picks up as many garments as he can carry and dumps them in the floor of the shower stall.

“I’ll go ahead and start,” he calls, dialing on the sonic. “Just--”

“I’ll pass you the rest, sure.”

The makeshift laundry goes fairly quickly, Hux passing clean(er) garments out the fogged transparisteel door, Ren passing in the rest of the pile, then his own clothes, briefs last, without commentary. 

When Hux powers off the sonic and comes out holding them, the first thing he notices is the two folded black stacks on the vanity. The second thing is.

Ren.

(He damn near drops the briefs.)

Every muscle Hux has been pressed into for the past two days stands out in the wan light. The dirt too, yes, and the scars Hux recognizes from Starkiller, but  _ fuck _ . 

His chest, his arms, his legs—all covered last night—look positively  _ sculpted _ , lined with gentle contours of muscle. He’s broad, which Hux knows, but it’s even less ignorable without his usual drapery. 

His cock is flaccid, but no less impressive than it was last night, the trail of dark hair leading to it now tantalizingly visible. 

Hux bites his tongue to keep from licking his lips. Looks down in a vain attempt to hide the flush prickling across his face. 

He’s fucked. He’s so beyond fucked right now, he’s—

Wasting time. Getting cold, or will be, once this passes. 

At least Ren’s gaze is anywhere but Hux’s face, either. (Probably counting bones and becoming progressively less interested.) His hand, however, is still on task—he’s holding the complimentary soap and shampoo that were sitting by the sink, dwarfed—naturally—by his grasp. 

Hux clears his throat, handing him the underwear. “I supposed we’d best, ah—“

“Yeah.” Ren takes the briefs and sets them wit what must be his stack of clothes. The tips of his ears are a charming pink. “Yeah, I’ll grab the—“

He turns back toward the counter for the pair of threadbare washcloths, allowing Hux a glimpse of tight ass before it becomes staring, and steps back into the shower stall to fiddle with the water dial. 

The massive showerhead sputters to life, but at least the first trickle is sufficiently clear. It’s ice-cold until it isn’t, spiking boiling hot before tempering out, just as the door cracks again to admit Ren. 

A flare of heat that has nothing to do with the water temperature courses through Hux, but he contains it. Controls it. Accepts the ratty washcloth Ren offers him.

He’s showered with other men--attractive men, at times, though none really compare to-- _ No.  _ Stop. Box this up, save it for later, at least, if not  _ never. _

With meticulous precision--as if he were simply cleaning a blaster--he soaps the washcloth with the bar Ren’s set on the shelf in the stall, then turns his back to Ren.

The hot water feels as incredible on his joints as it does his grimy skin, as if breaking through some crust or shell he’s grown over the past two days. Hux tips his head back, trying to enjoy it even as he scrubs as efficiently as possible.

Ren, however, is unshakably  _ present  _ behind him. Even in the Academy, you didn’t share a  _ showerhead.  _ Any quick motion bumps Ren’s elbow, presses up against his slick and solid back.

It’s a gamble even touching his own cock, but Hux does so as perfunctorily as possible. There’s no time for anything else. Nor space. Nor permission--

Hair. 

Hux’s hair.

He’s got two-day old product in it, oil, snow, mud, dust. (There’s also nothing to slick it back with after this, but that’s a problem for the morning.)

He turns less than 90 degrees to get at the shampoo bottle beside the soap bar, but as he reaches for it, strong fingers wrap around his wrist.

Hux glances up at Ren’s face, unsure what to say over the pounding of the water. Then struck mute. Even in the sallow light, the sheen of the water on Ren’s chest is--something, especially at four centimeters’ proximity. And for all the shower’s flattened Ren’s hair, it only makes it look that much longer, heavier. His eyes are ember-bright.

“Let me,” he murmurs, very nearly in Hux’s ear. 

Water drips off the end of his nose. It shouldn’t be attractive. It shouldn’t be alright. None of this. Especially not his vice grip on Hux’s wrist. 

But his fingers encircle it easily, and they felt incredible fucking up Hux’s hair last night. They’ll feel even better fixing it now.

Hux lets go of the bottle.

“Turn around,” Ren says in that same low voice, somehow under the rush of the water, rather than above it.

Hux is exhausted. They’ve probably only got two minutes left, anyway. He turns around.

There’s an electric moment of anticipation--Hux shuts his eyes, lets the water sluice down his neck, his chest, his torso, just  _ feeling _ it--before Ren’s hands are in his hair.

It shouldn’t shoot pins and needles from his scalp to the pit of his stomach, but it does. The squelch of the suds into Hux’s wet hair, the friction as Ren drags his fingers through it, massages his scalp--it’s. Good.

Every muscle in Hux’s body relaxes, and if the Force is involved, he isn’t sure he cares. He keeps his chin up, eyes closed.

Ren works silently, slowly. No more gentle, perhaps, than he was with Hux’s cock last night, but this somehow feels worlds more intimate. Others have touched his cock, but none have--

He shivers as Ren’s fingertips press down just a bit harder, raking from his hairline back, combing through, rinsing. The squelch of the shampoo lessens to nothing.

Ren is just. Stroking him. Touching him like he’s something fragile. (No one does that.)

He starts at the top again--one more time through--but as his hands reach Hux’s ears, they slip. Out. Down. Framing his neck.

Ren’s hands. 

Around his neck.

His throat.

The Force.

_ Long live-- _

Hux can’t breathe.

_ Longlivelonglivelonglive-- _

His body reacts before his reason can catch up. He flinches out from Ren’s grasp and the stream of the water, shoulders curved inward and heaving.

A protective pose he learned early on, a protective pose that’s entirely inappropriate here, yet well, well-earned.

“Shit.” Ren’s hands drop immediately, and there’s the thunk of his stepping backward. “Shit, Hux, I--”

“It’s fine.” Just breathe.  _ You  _ can  _ breathe.  _ This is stupid, this is stupid, this stupid.  _ (Is it?)  _ “It’s fine,” he insists. Everything is, always.

\--

Within fifteen minutes, Hux is sitting on the bed, fully dressed in his old, cleanish clothes. His wet hair drips down his collar and his spine, and he tugs the room’s one extra blanket around his shoulders with his free hand. His other grips a flimsi cup of the stale grey tea that came with the caf maker. He’s feeling the cold, finally. 

Ren just came out of the ‘fresher, and is hovering by the counter, picking at the galla seeds again.

The  _ child. _

Hux blows steam off his tea. “You are aware you’ll have to come over here at some point tonight.”

“I know,” Ren says, almost sullenly. He barely inclines his head. “Not yet.”

“Could you at least bring me a ration bar?”

That earns something like a half-pivot.

“Sure.” Ren bends to root through the saddlebag. “Sure, of course.”

When Ren steps toward the bed, he brings the galla seeds, as well, but only offers Hux the bar. He’s trying so hard to school his expression that he’s clenching his jaw. It looks maddeningly uncomfortable.

Hux takes the bar, then inches right across the mattress, clearing his former spot. 

“You can sit down,” he says, keeping his gaze on the bar. The cellophane crackles as he tears into it.

After a second of hesitation, Ren sinks onto the bed somewhat stiffly, the mattress dipping under his weight.

Hux sets his cup on the night-table beside him and readjusts the blanket before biting into the ration bar. Grainy, vanilla, aspartame-sweet. Ren crunches his seeds, and silence spreads between them, a chasm for all Hux’s knee rests two centimeters from Ren’s thigh.

As Hux finishes the bar, he weighs the merits of an apology. He shouldn’t have to make one--Ren should be more sensitive with his displays of...intimacy? Affection? 

But then, Hux himself shouldn’t be so fucking  _ weak.  _ Even more breakable, apparently, than Ren thought him. He’d been enjoying it, too--enjoying  _ Ren _ , or starting to again--but his body had to betray him. Remind him exactly why he shouldn’t--can’t--in the most vivid terms possible.

“Ren, I--” he starts. 

“It isn’t your fault.” Ren’s voice is almost painfully dry, has all the pulled-tightness of his set jaw.

Hux counters him instinctively. “I startle easily.”

“Also not your fault.”

That, Hux can’t argue. (Not, anyway, without baring the battered cadet from which he evolved.) He swaps the discarded bar wrapper for the tea, wraps both hands around it.

Ren, somehow, keeps talking. 

“Hux, I--” he starts. Stops again, because that’s what he does. Why he needs Hux around to make his speeches for him. “The things that happened, the day that Snoke died. They...shouldn’t have happened.”

“Snoke shouldn’t have died?” Hux returns, contrary as soon as he’s able. (Deflector shields back up.)

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.” Hux takes a sip of tea. “We should have eradicated the Resistance while we had them cornered, rather than letting them escape to continue terrorizing the galaxy.”

“I admit it,” Ren says, in that same careful tone, “but before that. You didn’t deserve it.”

What Ren doesn’t know is that he did. Doesn’t know how heavy the blaster felt in his greatcoat, how his fingers had brushed the grip. (How he’d hesitated for a second, yet made up his mind.)

Hux pops his lips, stares at the stained wall across from the bed. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Ren doesn’t miss a beat. “Whatever you were thinking about in the throne room--” he says. Delicate. “--you didn’t do it. I did. Everything that crossed my mind--every...defensive measure. I did it. Nothing can change that.”

The marvel, then, is that Hux is even alive, if Ren knows as much as he’s suggesting. Yet, of course, he’s right. Intention is one matter; punishment for it, another entirely.

Hux can only hum his agreement. He’s getting to the dregs of the tea, rolls the cup slowly between his hands instead of drinking.

“I’m trying,” Ren says. False start. “I want to show you...I’m--” For fuck’s sake. Take three: “Attempting to make it up to you.”

Hux scoffs, even as he’s fighting down the sting of it. The inevitable implication. “So that’s what all of that was,” he says, evenly. “An apology.”  _ Pity _ , he can’t say, doesn’t want to think.  _ Guilt.  _ “Indulging me, because of  _ course _ a few orgasms will fix this. And if you can get off at the same time, then--”

“Hux,” Ren says, so sharply that Hux turns toward him. His hand twitches, as if to go toward Hux’s, but he stays it in the act. Knows better. (Knows worse.) He holds Hux’s gaze for a moment, and his eyes are rimmed with liquid, voice thick as when he came last night. 

“Is there anything?” he says, soft, after eternity, in a tone aware of the answer already.

“No,” Hux says, because he’s straightforward and rational and self-protective. “You know there isn’t.”

Ren thins his lips, nods wordlessly.

But unfortunately, Hux is also cold and exhausted and still on-edge. 

Unfortunately, Ren is massive and exhausted and beautiful and  _ on offer _ .

(Fuck him.)

(Fuck everything.)

Hux sets his cup with the discarded wrapper. 

“Before I say this, I want to make it clear that what I’m asking for is not...compensation.”

“Okay.”

“Good,” Hux says, and faces him again. And this is stupid, this is reckless, it’s base and carnal and somewhat  _ wrong.  _ He keeps going. “As long as you understand that, I’d like to...pick up where we left off.”

Ren’s brows pinch inward. He gnaws briefly at his lower lip. “I didn’t think you’d--”

“I enjoyed myself,” Hux interrupts.  _ Enjoyed you _ . “Am I wrong in assessing that you did, too?”

“No, I-- it was incredible,” Ren replies. He sounds so young when he’s earnest. “You were.”

Hux chooses not to acknowledge the flush that prickles across his face at that. It’s a paltry compliment. Paltry.

“In that case,” he goes on, “I would like to suggest that we continue on that basis. That we--” He stumbles for the words, and doesn’t land right. “--just move forward.”

Ren glances at his lap instead of answering, and of course the corner of his mouth is pulling upward. Of course he thinks this is all so hilarious. His voice, however, is almost fond. “That is the most proposition-like proposition I’ve ever heard of.”

Hux can’t help the huff of laughter that escapes him. “And your response to it is?”

“Yes.” Ren doesn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

“Good,” Hux says.

And now what? What’s he supposed to say, ‘ _ go on then, put your dick in me _ ’?

Ren shifts beside him on the mattress, speaks up before Hux can puzzle his way to dirty talk. “How do you want me?”

His voice is still taut with emotion, but there’s a hungry edge to it. The monster, Hux hopes, rattling its chains.

Heat curls tentatively in Hux’s groin. (Already.)  _ (Disgusting.)  _ (Who cares?)

Fuck it.

He reaches across Ren’s lap to palm his cock. Ren responds to it almost immediately, moving into his touch. He strokes his thumb down the swell of it, the length. Ren hisses a soft breath through his teeth.

Fuck  _ yes. _

“You could start by fucking me until I forget what you’re sorry for.” 

For all Hux means it sultry, there’s a hint of inflection at the end: It comes out like a question.

“Just tell me what to do,” Ren replies. His tone is casual, but his breath catches at the end. He’s already hardening under Hux’s hand.

But this level of pliancy is. Unexpected. 

Hux, however, can work with that. He stills his hand, but keep it on Ren’s cock, applying just the slightest pressure.

“Tell you what to do?” he says, as coquettishly as possible. “I never imagined our Supreme Leader would care for...submission.”

“Not submission,” Ren snaps back. “It’s just… It isn’t like-- I mean, I haven’t--”

Good gods. Hux could laugh. He could positively  _ lose his shit _ .

He looks up at Ren’s face, which has gone far redder than the flush of arousal. His semi hasn’t flagged, but he’s gone abruptly silent, fidgeting with a loose thread on the comforter.

Still, Hux has to clarify. “Are you telling me you’ve never fucked anyone?”

Ren is quiet, lips pursed, staring at the blanket. “I guess I am,” he murmurs, after a moment.

Hux rubs his temples, has to partially cover his mouth to hide what must be a hysterical smile. Of course Ren’s never fucked anyone. 

Of course he hasn’t. Hux knows the man. Has worked with him for seven years, most of Ren’s adult life. Knowing Ren--his moods, his obsessions, his isolation--it’s hardly surprising.

It’s hilarious, though. It’s fucking hilarious, because for the past two days, Ren has done nothing but favors Hux never asked for. And the one Hux does--the simplest, least dangerous--he doesn’t know how to grant.

Naturally.

And Hux has just humiliated him over it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, lifting his hand. “I shouldn’t have presumed, I-- Last night gave another impression. I apol--”

“What we did last night--” Ren’s had his legs straight in front of him, but he bends his knees now, pulls them slightly in toward himself. “--I’ve done that before. Just not--the rest.”

“I’m perfectly alright with more of that,” Hux replies, as softly as he can, “if you’d like.”

Ren finally looks up. “No, if you want me inside you, I-- I want to do that for you.”

Hux hardly hears him. “If you’d prefer, I can ride you, or just fuck you, I wouldn’t--”

“But that isn’t what you had in mind.”

“No,” Hux admits, “no, it wasn’t, but that was before I knew you weren’t comfortable with it.”

“I’m completely comfortable with it. Or I will be.” Ren tilts his head, the corner of his mouth tugging up into that damn half-smile. “You wouldn’t be a bad first.”

Hux huffs a laugh, at the remark, at Ren, at the absurdity of all of this. “How flattering.”

“Like I said,” Ren insists, “just tell me what to do.”

And Hux should tell him  _ no _ , should tell him this isn’t the right way to lose the last of his virginity: in a shitty motel room, with your top lieutenant bottoming.

But for all his sarcasm, there  _ is  _ something flattering about it: the keenness in his gaze, the way his voice caught on the word  _ first _ . The size of him too, of course, and the fact that Hux will be the only being in the galaxy to have enjoyed it. 

Heat rushes to his cock at the thought of it, and reaches out to palm Ren again. Ren drops his knees, allowing him access, and Hux finds some hardness remains. He runs his hand up and down Ren’s length, unabashedly possessive.

Ren smirks at the ceiling, even as his cock swells. “I take it I’ve persuaded you.”

Hux snorts. “I’m afraid so.” He pauses, shrugs off his blanket, and lifts his hands. Ren’s hips buck slightly upward, chasing his touch. 

Hux, however, swings his legs over his side of the bed. Has to. “I stole some lube from the fuel station.”

“Of course you did.”

Hux doesn’t dignify that with a defense. “I’ll go get it, shall I?”

\--

Ren proves adept with the lube, at least, and Hux lazily strokes himself to full hardness just watching him, those thick, wet fingers on Ren’s swollen cock. 

He stripped before settling back onto the bed with the lube, and Ren did the same, their clothes a mingled pile of black in the floor, like the laundry stack of an hour ago.

“That should be sufficient,” he tells Ren, once his own cock is curling up toward his stomach, almost painfully hard. His voice sounds taut in his own ears.

Ren stops, caps the lube, and turns toward him. In this light, his eyes look all pupil. He wets his lips. “You’re ready?”

“Have been.” Hux smiles, however thin and briefly.

He has no idea about Ren’s range of knowledge, how much of this he should be narrating, explaining. 

It doesn’t help that Ren himself is distracting: the thin line of his scar snaking from his face to his right pec, the way his hair falls out from behind his ear every time he moves forward, the prow of his nose in profile. And his fucking mouth.

Hells.

Hux rolls over and catches his lips. Ren makes a small, startled sound into Hux’s mouth before easing into it, tracing his tongue across the chaste seam of Hux’s lips. Hux grinds down once, Ren’s erection jutting against his stomach, but draws back when his heart rate picks up, pleasure unfurling at the base of his spine.

He could come like this, humping against Ren’s naked body, but he doesn’t want to. He pulls back, Ren nipping at his lips.

“I’ll want your fingers first,” Hux murmurs into his mouth.

Ren’s lube-slick hand wanders down his spine, stops just above his cleft. Not a question, really, but a  _ do-go-on.  _ His eyes search Hux’s face.

Hux swallows, presses a kiss to his collarbone. “Let me make it easy for you.”

He rolls off of Ren and onto his hands and knees, opening his legs as much as he can without losing his balance. 

The mattress dips and creaks as Ren moves behind Hux, taking his cue.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” comes breathy from behind Hux. There’s the scratch of the lube uncapping--at least he thought to bring it--then the squelch of it on his fingers.

And then he just sits there, for a moment, surely not awestruck by the pale skin and freckles. 

_ Confused.  _ He must not be sure what’s next.

Hux’s cock is throbbing so hard he can hardly think. Ren’s single point of inadequacy shouldn’t be as provocative as his many competencies, but it is. Perhaps it’s just  _ him _ , but Hux can’t entertain that now.

“You can touch me,” he says.

“Where-- how do I--” Ren sound sloppy, halfway undone.

“Just--put your hands on me.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath, then the warm brush of Ren’s palms against Hux’s cheeks, the stickiness of the lube on his right fingers. His hands nearly span the breadth of them. Hux bites his lip at the realization, screws his eyes shut.

_ Focus. _

“Alright,” Hux says, with effort, “hold onto my hip with your left hand.”

“Your hip,” Ren echoes, not really a question. He slides his hand there, anyway, leaving the vacated spot colder. His fingers easily encircle Hux’s hipbone, kneading into the softness beside it.

“Perfect.” It’s a stupid little encouragement, it’s nothing, but Hux means it, somehow. “Now, take your right forefinger and just--”

Ren lifts his hand, already responding, then his finger presses into the top of Hux’s cleft. “I’m going to push down.”

“Good.”

Ren’s pushing down is at first hardly enough to part Hux’s cheeks, much less run between them to reach his rim, but he manages after a few seconds. Exhales like he’s just moved a mountain.

“Tell me if that feels okay,” he says, before he’s so much as started to penetrate Hux.

“Doesn’t feel like anything yet,” Hux returns. “You do have to get inside.”

“Yeah,” Ren says, “just tell me--”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Okay.”

“Alright.”

With another hiss of breath, Ren pushes in, slow and meticulous, his first knuckle breaching the ring of muscle with a stretch that stings just enough. He stops there, for a moment, and Hux is about to have to say something, when he presses further, sinking past his second knuckle, starting to fill Hux.

Just  _ resting _ , like it’s nothing, like there’s no  _ urgency  _ here.

“You can move.”

“Move how?”

“Doesn’t matter, just--”  _ Make a place for yourself. _

Ren’s complied before Hux can either finish or reword, sinking up and down, stretching as best he can. It already feels good--the length of his fingers, the friction of his knuckles. Hux flinches as he brushes his prostate.

“Fuck, did I--”

Hux blinks back a flash of white static, digs his fingers into the flimsy comforter. “No, that’s, ah--” Ren moves his finger there again, this time with purpose. Hux inhales sharply. “--ideal.”

“I can tell,” Ren murmurs, keeps fucking Hux with that one obscene finger. “Now I can.”

Hux swallows. “You can tell.”

“In the Force,” Ren goes on, low, soft. “You never feel this bright.”

Approximately half of that sentence was actually intelligible, but if it’s going to get him fucked better, Hux can’t question it.

“You can use your other finger,” he prompts instead. 

He could take three, of course, could take four, or with work, Ren’s whole goddamn fist, but this is merely practical fingering. Last-minute prep, as it were, for Ren’s cock.

Ren pulls out with a wet sound, then there’s the pressure of a second fingertip against Hux’s rim, the additional stretch of it. He sinks in faster this time, and Hux bites back a yelp at the sting. 

Soon enough, he’s moving like he was before, carelessly brushing Hux’s prostate every few strokes. It’s good, of course, it’s fucking amazing, but it’s agonizingly slow.

“Try opening your fingers,” Hux suggests, far too breathless.

“That won’t be too much?”

He has huge fucking hands, and he almost knows how to use them.

“I’m about to take your massive cock, Ren. It’ll be good for me.”

With that, Ren scissors, stretching Hux wide. He does cry out at that--can’t help it, at this point--but immediately assures Ren he can do it again.

He does. Again and again and again, until Hux is already sore and tears prickle the corners of his eyes. He’s dazed, dizzy. His thighs are quivering. He buries his fingers in the comforter again, grits his teeth.

“That’s enough,” he manages.

Ren stops immediately, starts pulling out. “You feel good, I just--”

Hux cuts him off. “I told you I’d tell you. Now I’m telling you.”

“You want my cock,” he says, some of the insecurity suddenly replaced by familiar smugness.

“Yes, that’s the point of this.”

“I know.” Ren withdraws all the way at that, leaving Hux open and empty, aching a bit, but already in the best way. “Is there anything that’ll make it better?”

The mattress grumbles as he shifts again, clearly positioning himself without further instruction. The hard tip of his cock brushes Hux’s rim.

He already feels halfway fucked out, arms and legs trembling, This might be embarrassingly fast.

“Take my right hip, too,” he says.

Ren does, caresses the divot of bone there, then thrusts in without warning.

He stretched Hux pretty fantastically, but his cock does more, spreading Hux centimeter by centimeter. It hurts, but Hux knows better than to make a sign. Doesn’t want this to stop for the second it’ll take to reassure him. He bites down, squeezes his eyes shut against the way they’re watering.

“Fuck, Hux,” Ren murmurs, and repeat it at intervals, finally gasping as he bottoms out.

Hux echoes his exhale.

“How is this?” Ren’s voice is more tender than insecure.

Hux swallows, feeling torn in two, feeling fuller than he can remember. “Perfect,” he manages. “You’re doing so well for me.”

“Tell me when to move.”

“Any time.”

Ren does. He starts with short, shallow thrusts that hit anywhere but Hux’s prostate, but strikes it hard once he pulls out and thrusts back in, hips smacking into Hux’s ass.

Hux can’t stifle his scream.

“Is that--” Ren starts, hoarse.

“Yes, please, more, again.” Hux is babbling in his own ears, but he hardly cares, pleasure singing through his bloodstream. 

No one else has ever felt the slide of Ren’s cock, the rhythm of his hips. Heard his little gasps of breath or the praise and endearments that periodically gush out of him. The most powerful man in the galaxy, and he’s coming to pieces inside Hux--is  _ pleasing  _ Hux, in a way reserved for no one else.

It’s sloppy, and it’s harsh, and it’s going to ache tomorrow--already does, in fact--because he hasn’t yet learned finesse, but it’s fine. Pain is fine. It’s enough that it’s him.

“Hux, I’m--” he murmurs, pulling back again. “I’m close.”

“That’s alright,” Hux replies, breathlessly. He is too, one step from the edge--balls tight, cock pulsing, head buzzing. “Go on and come.”

Ren does, with a sharp sound in the back of his throat and a long exhale. He’s spilling warm inside Hux, cock pulsing, shaft angled against Hux’s prostate.

Hux is gone before Ren’s anything like soft--something about the rhythm of his breathing, the imagined parting of his lips. Hux’s spend stripes his own stomach, spatters the comforter beneath him. Something wet slips down his face, and he tastes salt.

His arms are shaking, legs are shaking, and he’s coming and coming and coming. 

Finally it stops, and Ren is slipping out of him, his release running warm between Hux’s thighs. He leans over Hux, presses a kiss to his shoulderblade.

“How did I do?” he says, in an ambivalent tone that must be earnest.

Hux rolls back over underneath him, narrowly avoiding the mess, allows Ren to pin him against the comforter.

Ren’s eyelashes are wet, clumping together. It’s gorgeous. He’s gorgeous. 

“Hux?” he says, after a moment.

The sex.

It wasn’t perfect, but neither is Ren. Hux is still fairly certain he’s never come harder in his life. It was a combination of factors, not just technique.

“Not bad.” 

Hux leans up to peck his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: Kylo touches Hux's neck in a gentle, intimate way, but it briefly reminds him of the throne room. He flinches back, then leaves the room, embarrassed by the reaction. He and Kylo talk through what happened--both what Kylo did and how Hux responded just now--before touching each other again.


	5. Chapter 5

In the morning, the radiator is running. It pops and hisses sporadically, apparently in working order after all. 

The room is warmer than it was last night--or at least Hux is, for all he’s still naked. The bedding on top of him helps, his coat covering all of it for extra insulation--Ren’s suggestion. 

Ren’s arm, though--or honestly, all of him, pressed against Hux’s back--seems as effective as it has the past two nights. Less necessary, perhaps, here than on the side of the speeder lane or an unventilated storehouse, but nonetheless somehow grounding, comforting. 

Ren is still asleep, his steady breaths warm on Hux’s neck. But the chrono on the nighttable reads 0800, and a bright finger of daylight stabs into the room through the split between the curtains. They need to get moving, for all Hux’s fresh soreness is already protesting a day on the bike, on top of the existing aches.

Perhaps it snowed again overnight. They can just stay in bed until it melts--Hux has more than a morning’s worth of lessons for Ren. 

But still, he has to know.

He starts to maneuver out from the dead weight of Ren’s arm, but Ren stirs with the faintest motion, a startled hitch to his breathing.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Hux murmurs, shrugging off Ren’s arm to roll over and face him.

Ren blinks at him, eyes bright, but still cataloguing his surroundings. Hux lets him, while he catalogues Ren’s moles. 

“I needed to be woken,” he says after a moment, slurrily.

“Yes, you did. It’s past oh eight hundred hours.”

Instead of responding, Ren reaches out to comb Hux’s loose hair out of his face, tuck it behind his ear. Hux’s eyelids flutter shut involuntarily, but he allows himself to relax as Ren’s hand lingers on his cheek, covering the stubble coming in. 

“Did it snow overnight?” Ren asks.

Hux opens his eyes, turns his chin enough to kiss the palm of Ren’s hand, before answering. “I was going to check.”

Ren’s hand slides down at that, carefully avoiding his throat, releasing him. 

Hux swings his legs over the side of the mattress and rounds the bed somewhat stiffly, each step painful. Hopefully Ren doesn’t notice. 

Hux blinks as he parts the curtains, barely a quarter-meter, but enough to let in the white daylight of two suns. Outside, a thin layer of snow blankets the scree of the speeder lot, the narrow rusted windowsill, but it’s already thinning with the day’s warmth.

That shouldn’t be disappointing. 

Today marks Day Three off the grid, away from his ship and the Order and everything he’s ever known. 

Day Three in constant danger of being recognized, captured, or shot. He should be looking forward to clearing the province--they ought to reach the border by midday tomorrow, if everything goes as planned. 

Yet going back has become as much of an unknown variable as being out here, with this new thing between himself and Ren. It’s one thing as a carnal affair, borne of wilderness backroads and a sordid tin-roof motel, as if they’re caught in a different dimension, totally cut off from the real world, and actions with lingering consequences.

The intimacy that desperation has bred between them here will likely evaporate under the pressures of the mission, the need for professionalism, and the inevitable arguments. At least out here they can agree on one common objective.

A part of Hux wants to stop and enjoy this: Ren, without the masks or the formalities or the command. Ren, at his disposal. 

“How is it?” Ren calls from the bed.

Hux turns, blinking again as he readjusts to the darkness of the room, though he leaves the curtains split wider behind him. “Not prohibitive,” he reports.

Ren’s face falls for a second, unmistakably disappointed. Perhaps he had the same hopes for the morning. It’s Hux’s sworn duty, however, to dash them in favor of the Order. 

“We ought to make the most of the daylight,” he continues. “We’ve been away far too long.”

“I know,” Ren says, almost gravely. 

Hux is expecting a _ but _. Hoping for it, even. He could explain the delay as simply following the Supreme Leader’s orders. However, none comes.

Ren sits up, plants his feet on the ground, and grabs Hux’s greatcoat, folding it over his bare arm. “Let’s get going.”

***

The weather proves much like yesterday’s: morning sunshine wearing off into cloud cover by noon. The temperature stays higher, but with every kilometer further north, that’s less helpful. 

Stiff, sore, and tired, pressed against Ren’s back, the cold wind of the speeder’s air friction is almost unbearable. He allows himself to lean into Ren for shelter at intervals, then to close his eyes. He isn’t asleep, or anything close to it, but it relaxes his muscles, keeps his eyes from drying or catching dirt stirred by the speeder’s stuttering pulsors.

He’s in one such reverie when the speeder veers hard to the right, jolting him back to full awareness. The lane is cutting through a patch of sparse trees, but Ren’s banked toward a thicker clutch of them.

“What is it?” Hux says into his ear, over the roar of the motivator.

Ren merely tilts his head up. The day’s first Resistance patrol shuttle flies under the clouds. High enough that it doesn’t stir the ground, and isn’t louder than the speeder, but low enough to cast a dim silhouette across the lane.

Ren whips hard around the first few trees in the thicket, jarring Hux’s teeth, but eventually brakes. Hux disembarks first, and they stand against a trunk, wordlessly passing a water bottle back and forth, until the shuttle is out of sight.

Ren stays off the road after that.

***

The patrol coverage is indubitably getting heavier near the province border: three more shuttles pass overhead before nightfall, demanding three more tense, chilly, silent breaks from the road. 

Each one seems to unnerve Ren more, his posture stays rigid, eyes bright and alert, pacing loops around whatever tree they’ve decided to use as a shield. 

Hux does a few with him at each stop, silently taking his hand, but it’s uncomfortable in gloves, and Hux would rather lean against the trunk than walk.

After nightfall, the two that pass are easier to spot: red beams from beneath them crisscross the ground, in unmistakable searchlight patterns.

The clouds, at least, seem to have blown off, allowing the clearest view they’ve had of the planet’s considerable starscape, still the brighter for the planet’s lack of moons. 

Hux hardly appreciates it.

Within a few hours of full dark, Ren banks left without warning--no shuttle lights in the sky, he must be wanting to make camp.

He says little as he starts a fire, less as Hux passes him a chocolate ration bar. His face is pinched, worried, wind-burned, and the supposedly slight effort of sparking the campfire seems to drain him. Hux is little better company.

They still sit close, though, beside the fire, knees pressed together. 

Hux rests a hand on Ren’s, strokes idly with his thumb as they watch the flames. Ren relaxes slightly, but makes no other sign.

“What is it?” Hux asks. 

Ren is watching the smoke curl up, little more than a thin gray wisp, surely dissipating. It takes a moment for his gaze to break away, meet Hux’s.

“The Force is trying to tell me something,” he says, cryptically.

“Well, what’s it saying?”

“I don’t know,” Ren retorts. “It’s trying, I can’t… get the complete signal.”

Hux bites his lip. This sounds like exhaustion talking--driving the speeder demands far more energy than merely holding on. Nonetheless, he knows better than to dismiss Ren’s premonitions outright. “Is it like it was when we were planning the mission?”

Ren shakes his head. “Vaguer. It could be nothing.”

“That’s right,” Hux says, sliding his hand up to squeeze Ren’s thigh. It isn’t invitation, merely an attempt at comfort. Ren seems to understand it as such. “Let me take first watch. You need to rest.”

Ren doesn’t argue.

Within minutes, he’s curled up with his back to the fire, using the saddlebag as a pillow. He’s asleep almost as soon as he’s pulled his cloak over him.

His hair catches the firelight as the fire burns down. Hux keeps his hands on his lapels, tugging the greatcoat constantly closer, to keep from reaching to touch it. The sudden touch would only startle him back awake. Hux decides he’ll give him until the fire is out entirely.

What must be the first hour drags on infinitely. The cold breeze blowing the smoke northward is the only thing keeping Hux alert. He’s considering their stock of rations, as well as the logistics of sliding his hand into the saddlebag to fish out the galla seeds--at least give his mouth something to do--when there’s a flare of red light ahead, cutting horizontally across the lane and into the surrounding trees.

“Fuck,” he hisses. The Resistance. 

All the bleariness drains from him at once, heart pounding in his ears, blood singing with adrenaline. He turns to shake Ren awake, but catches him just as his eyes open, hand straying instinctively toward his lightsaber, where it’s resting beside the saddlebag.

The shuttle’s sublight engine hums overhead, deafening as it approaches.

“Come on,” Hux says, staggering to his feet, but it’s lost in the roar.

Ren stands likewise, grabs the saddlebag with his left hand, and holds out his right.

Hux stamps out the fire before taking it, running beside Ren for cover, stumbling periodically over roots in the blind dark, lit only from behind by the shuttle’s scanlights. 

After a few meters, the forest floor dips slightly downward in the beginnings of a tree-clad embankment. Ren pulls Hux down under a low branch of a thick-trunked tree. A flare of red shadows his face.

Hux sucks in the most even breath he can, trying to regulate his breathing. “This will do little good if they have heat sensors,” he manages after a moment.

Ren just nods back.

Hux doesn’t pursue it, doesn’t admit to the validity of whatever Force-induced anxiety had troubled him earlier. Ren’s jaw is clenched, back ramrod straight--he’s sitting like a coiled wire, like he’s waiting on something.

Hux isn’t sure he wants to know what. 

The shuttle buzzes closer still. The red light never passes directly over them, but it’s getting brighter, stronger. It’s only a matter of time.

Hux’s hand strays to his blaster. Ren’s hovers near his lightsaber.

Another band of red cuts across the forest. The shuttle’s engine vibrates in Hux’s sternum.

Then comes the whine of laserfire. Hux turns instinctively toward it, in time to see a green bolt strike the clearing they just vacated. A plume of dirt rises, made black by the shadows. Ren’s shoulder flinches against Hux’s.

Hux’s heart hammers in his ears. For a brief, horrible moment, the shuttle dips lower, as if to fire again, with better precision, but it doesn’t.

The beams of scanlights blink out. The shuttle’s roar grows fainter, and its traditional underbelly lights grow dim.

Hux doesn’t look down until it’s disappeared entirely, replaced by the starlight of before. Ren’s fingers are entwined with his own, the leather of their gloves shining, just a bit.

Hux squeezes. 

Ren offers him a tight-lipped smile. “You okay?”

Hux nods. “Are you?”

“The feeling’s gone,” he says. “Now.”

“Message received,” Hux tries to quip, over the building worry in the pit of his stomach.

“The bike,” Ren says for him.

Hux swallows, runs his thumb across Ren’s knuckles. “We should wait until morning,” he says. “They might--”

“Come back for more,” Ren supplies. He tips his head back against the trunk.

Wordlessly, Hux leans into him. He wraps an arm around Hux’s shoulders. Hux hugs one across his torso, and they sit like that--tangled into each other--for what must be hours in the quiet, empty dark.

At some point, Hux falls asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

“I don’t suppose there’s anything you can—“

Ren doesn’t answer. Doesn’t so much as glance at Hux. He’s transfixed by the wreckage in front of them.

As air strikes go, last night’s was all but insubstantial, low-impact by Order standards, if surgical in range. (Leave it to the Resistance to invest research funds in minimizing collateral damage, rather than maximizing firepower.)

The extent of the damage is limited to the small clearing where Hux and Ren attempted their first campsite, but the destruction is...comprehensive.

Every square centimeter of ground is scorched black, a fine, powdered-sugar layer of ash coating the top of it. The branches of a few of the surrounding trees have been reduced to blackened stubs, their limbs apparently vaporized by the blast. No trees appear to have fallen entirely.

But Ren isn’t looking at the flora.

He has eyes only for the single object the explosion left behind: the twisted, charred carcass of the bike. Its metal chassis is scorched beyond recognition, bent at the edges and curved at the middle, as if some gigantic monstrous creature tried to wring it out like a washrag. 

The entire control panel is nothing but crisp plast, the ignition switch indistinguishable. The shards of the windscreen litter the earth around the wreck, also blackened at the edges, yet glittering faintly under the high, cold suns. The back half is split open, metal curling apart at the seams, burned out where the fuel tank must have exploded. It’s remarkable even this much is left of it. 

Hux ignores the dread curdling in the pit of his stomach. Digs his gloved fingertips into his gloved palms on instinct.

“I asked,” he repeats, “if there’s anything at all you can do about this?”

Ren’s answer is instant, biting, and brittle. “_ No. _” He still won’t look at Hux.

“Very well,” Hux snaps back. “I thought it was at least worth--”

Ren’s hands ball at his sides, and he’s still staring at the speeder, as if he _ could _ do something. “If I could fix this, why the _ fuck _wouldn’t I have just done so? On my own. Without your having to ask.”

“Then pardon me for deferring to your abilities,” Hux scoffs. “Supreme Leader.”

He spent half the night shivering in this man’s arms, but the moment conflict arises, it’s as if all of that has evaporated. They’re co-commanders again, rivals with incompatible worldviews.

“My _ abilities _ can’t do anything about this.” Ren finally whirls toward him. “I can’t. You can’t. _ Nothing fucking can. _ ” 

“So I gather.”

Ren’s gaze sparks dangerously, that volcanic glint. “You aren’t upset about this.”

It isn’t a question, but it ought to be. He’s bad at questions. At admitting there are things he and his Force don’t know. It’s absurd. He is.

“I _ am _ upset,” Hux says. “Frankly, I’m fucking terrified, if you’d pay attention. I have no idea what we ought to do except just start walking, and I merely thought that perhaps you--”

“Shit.” Ren’s jaw is tense, teeth gritted, gaze darting to the bike. He’s ignoring Hux entirely, and his hand twitches toward his lightsaber.

“Ren--”

“_Shit_!”

It flashes across Hux’s mind’s eye, telegraphed before it happens: his hand on the saber, his finger on the activator. The crackle, the smell, and then. The blade--spitting sparks, slicing what’s left of the bike into junkyard pieces. Into evidence. He’ll wear himself out in the process, and then what will--

Ren’s fingers curl around the hilt, and he unhooks it from his belt in a single, rapid motion.

Fuck.

Hux is faster. Has to be. 

He watches his hand encircle Ren’s wrist as if it belonged to someone else, or he were watching it on a holo. Some base instinct to hold him back. It propels Hux between him and the bike, brings him chest-to-chest with Ren, the unignited saber pointing dangerously toward Hux’s shoulder.

Ren’s chest heaves, and his tendons strain under Hux’s grasp. His finger is still well in range of the activator switch, but apparently Hux himself must be a deterrent.

“Don’t,” Hux breathes.

“It’s already fucked.” Ren nods over Hux’s shoulder toward the speeder. “It doesn’t matter.”

Hux risks stroking his thumb along the inside of Ren’s wrist. “It also isn’t worth your strength.”

Ren’s muscles relax slightly, and he’s quiet for a moment, throat working. His eyes glimmer faintly with the promise of furious tears. Hux should be on the verge of them, too, or would be, if not for the fear. 

He keeps rubbing Ren’s pulse point. There’s nothing else in the galaxy that he can do right now.

After a long moment, Ren’s gaze drops, muscles relax. He lowers his arm, but Hux still holds onto it, dimly aware that he’s preventing him from putting the lightsaber away, but unable to let go.

“What are we going to do?” Hux asks, as softly as he can. No demand in it. No criticism.

“I don’t know.”

That’s a first, but Hux doesn’t pour salt in it. It’s stinging him, too.

He meant what he said about just walking, but it’s a piss-poor option--even a day’s ride from the border.

If the Resistance keeps running any kind of surveillance flights, they’ll figure out soon enough that their strike didn’t garner the intended result. Foot-travelers are hopeless against an armed shuttle.

And that’s _ if _ it doesn’t snow again, and _ if _they don’t freeze to death regardless, after collapsing from exhaustion and hypothermia. 

There has to be a better choice. There has to be.

Hux massages Ren’s wrist one last time before dropping it. Ren hooks his lightsaber onto the loop on his belt again. His hands look less than steady.

A breeze snakes into the clearing, stirring the fresh ash, and Hux covers his mouth and nose at the charred stench. 

“Let’s have breakfast,” he says, when it’s past. “Away from here.”

Ren spares the bike another glance, but then nods. “Okay.”

***

There isn’t much to say over cold ration bars, and there _ aren’t _ any better options. 

By Ren’s memory and Hux’s calculations, the bike would have reached the border sometime tomorrow afternoon. Early tomorrow morning, if they’d ridden through the night.

Hux has long finished his ration bar and stood up to pace, but can’t let go of the wrapper. He’s wadding and straightening it again between his hands, folding it into squares then crinkling it back up. It keeps his hands busy anyway, and the cold from settling into his joints.

He balls it up again, reaching a burnt branch at the edge of the clearing and turning back to face Ren. “I suppose I meant what I suggested,” he says. The cellophane crackles. “About starting walking.”

Ren is still sitting down, perfectly still, with his own wrapper under his thigh to keep it from blowing away. His back is braced against a tree trunk, chin tipped up so his skull is, too. His eyes were closed for a while, but now they’re open, staring dispassionately at the needle-heavy branches overhead. 

He lowers his chin and his gaze, at least, to study Hux’s trajectory. Says nothing.

He’s impossible.

“Unless the Force has revealed to you a better solution?”

“No,” Ren snaps back, looks up again.

Not, apparently, for lack of trying.

Hux turns on his heel, paces back in the opposite direction. “At any rate, we can’t stay here.”

Ren drags two fingers through the ash on the ground, leaving deep rills. “I know.”

“If you know, then let’s--”

“We were so fucking _ close.” _His fingers ball into a fist, which slams down, sending up a tiny cloud of fine powder. Overhead, timber cracks, though nothing falls. “I got us all this way, through everything that could have possible gone wrong, and now--”

All Hux hears is _ I. _It’s all he can do not to stop in his tracks to (a) run his head through the nearest tree trunk; or (b) turn 180 degrees back toward the speeder lane and start walking by himself. He needs Ren less, without the bike.

The trouble, though, is that he can sympathize.

He pauses, instead, in front of Ren. It’s strange, looming over him like this. He’s sitting with his knees to his chest, and a bit of ash has caught in his hair. Hux resists the urge to crouch down, cup his cheek, and brush it out.

He pulls his hands behind his back. “You couldn’t have prevented this.”

Ren gnaws his lip for a moment, uncurls his fist long enough to splay his fingers in the ash. “I could have,” he says, quietly. “From the beginning.”

Hux sighs. There’s no time to humor his moods, they have to get _ moving _\-- “If you’ve now decided to refer to what happened in the capital as ‘The Beginning’--”

“I sensed it.” Ren cuts him off, syllables emerging in a blur. “I told you that was why I came.”

“_ Sensed it _,” Hux echoes under his breath, suddenly weary. “And no, you didn’t.”

“I told you I didn’t come to help with your negotiation.”

For fuck’s sake. The failed negotiation feels like it happened in another life, to a Hux, perhaps, who’s dead and buried. And now Ren feels the need to reanimate it. All of it.

“Yes,” Hux says, over-enunciating to keep his teeth from grinding, “because you were apparently burdened with the overwhelming need to micromanage me, and it proved fortuitous. Now get up.”

“No, I mean I _ sensed _it.” Ren’s fist sends up another puff of ash.

Hux shakes his head, raises his eyebrows, lost and impatient. 

Ren keeps going. “Shortly before you were supposed to leave, I had a-- A feeling. Like something was going to go wrong.”

“Yes, me too, it’s called generalized anxiety. We need to--”

“It’s different from that.” Ren spirals his finger through the ash and dirt. “With the Force.”

Hux has never made any pretense of understanding the Force, for all he’s learned about it--and its limits--over the past few days. Still, this further curdles the worry already churning in the pit of his stomach. “So you...what? Had some sort of premonition of what would happen? Yet allowed the mission to proceed?”

“I hoped it was nothing,” Ren retorts, bristling all but visibly. “Sometimes it is. Not this time.”

Hux purses his lips, drops out of parade rest to run his empty hand through his hair. He jams the wrapper into his pocket with the other.

This certainly explains...Ren’s spontaneous urge to participate in a routine diplomatic mission. Given the fact that he apparently _ cares _about Hux. And knows Hux well enough to know he would’ve dismissed such concerns outright.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter here, now, next to the wreck of their one guarantee of escape.

“Look. Ren. If I--” Fuck it. Hux drops to his haunches beside Ren. Puts a hand on his knee. “If every time I thought something would end badly, I didn’t do it, I would have accomplished absolutely nothing in my life to date.” He rubs a circle on Ren’s leggings. “Not your fault.”

Ren levels his gaze at Hux, but his shoulders relax under the pressure of Hux’s thumb. He snorts. “I think that’s a first.”

“What, that I’m not--” Hux looks down at his own hand, moving slowly against Ren’s joint. “--blaming you for my misfortunes at the soonest opportunity?”

“Pretty much.”

“Don’t get used to it.” Hux squeezes his knee, stands back up, and holds out his hand. Ren takes it. 

***

“For future reference,” Hux says, several hours later, dislodging his boot from a particularly viscous patch of mud, “if you had mentioned your...feeling, or whatever, we could have had Signals surge collection efforts against the group we were meeting with.”

“Now that I know you’ll take my feelings seriously,” Ren returns, with a deadpan matter-of-factness.

For one thing, Hux wouldn’t go that far. For another, there’s something in the way Ren says _ feelings _ that makes him unsure which ones are in question.

Still, Hux can’t _ not _smile. “As Supreme Leader, you are in fact authorized to command our intelligence units, with or without my blessing.”

“I prefer your blessing.” Ren momentarily falls out of step to bump Hux’s shoulder. “Makes things run more smoothly.”

“I _ am _ a formidable opponent.”

Ren dips his head, hair--getting oily again, Hux notices--obscuring what’s perhaps even an answering smile. 

Hux bites his lip, and walks quietly for the next few steps.

The conversation so far has been surprisingly civil, now that there’s no longer any speeder motivator to mask the quiet between them. 

Ren somehow responded equally lightly to Hux’s complaint about how Ren’s neglect of his prescience was going to be the muddy end of Hux’s boots, and the exchange has been almost _ natural _from there. Teasing, but also not entirely unproductive, between Ren’s explanation of his sensations’ general lack of detail and Hux’s advice on pivoting Signals collection.

It’s a welcome distraction from the cold wind and the glare of the suns as they’ve emerged from behind morning cloud cover. 

Hux walks constantly on the _ Finalizer _, of course, but his last proper march was almost ten years ago, in warmer weather, but admittedly with a sniper rifle strapped to his back and a squadron of troopers behind him. 

At any rate, talking to Ren is preferable to acknowledging his growing side-stitch. He’s contemplating mentioning that mission, just to keep the conversation alive, but Ren picks up the thread more or less where Hux left it.

“You never gave Snoke the shit you give me.”

Hux scoffs. “And by _ shit _, I suppose you mean my invaluable feedback?”

He catches the quirk of Ren’s lips this time. “When you put it that way,” Ren says, full stop.

It isn’t that Hux never pushed back against Snoke, but he’s always been more comfortable doing so with Ren. From the first day, even before..._ whatever this is _has materialized between them.

“Old habits,” he says. 

Ren hefts the saddlebag on his shoulders.

***

Ren winds up getting the _ last march _ story. And the one before that, and the one preceding _ that _. And the very first one, because even fourteen years later, Hux is still damn proud of that shot.

At first, he tells himself it’s advantageous for Ren to hear about how good he is with a blaster. For Ren’s situational awareness, during any given interaction with Hux, it’s good for him to know Hux has killed. Has readily applicable _ experience _in the field.

But by the time Ren actively asks for a third story, the rationalization has dissolved with the slush on the side of the road.

Ren’s a good listener--he’s a trained interrogator, after all--and Hux doesn’t mind an attentive audience.

Ren shares little of his own background in return, and Hux is too wary to ask. Not that he really minds. At any rate, he’s already intimately familiar with all of Ren’s own war stories.

Anything else would relate to Snoke or his other life, before the Order, and one wrong question might shatter the fragility of all of this. 

Ren is nothing, still, if not volatile. 

***

Hux is only marginally sore when they stop for the night, far earlier than they have been with the bike’s headlight in play. 

The second sun still hovers over the horizon, casting the lingering clouds pink and orange, enough light by which to find a small clearing and gather campfire fuel. It can hardly be later than 1900 hours local—yet another way this is slowing them down—but Hux’s legs, at least, are grateful.

They’d both grown quieter as the day dragged by, for all Ren’s muscles are more used to stints of marching. (He’d never describe it as such, but Hux knows better.) 

The silence, though, had been more companionable than awkward, or at least Hux had grown too tired to worry about it. One thing he’s known about Ren—and which Ren continues to confirm—is that Ren’s fairly comfortable with quiet. More than he is, anyway.

Right now, Ren’s hunched over the fire, building the blaze the Force sparked with needles and twigs. It crackles at his touch, and he’s muttering to it under his breath. 

Hux is smarter than to interrupt. He massages his sore calves, brushing off as much dried mud as he can. The cold is settling in, but fortunately Ren’s quick with the fire. 

Once it’s a steady blaze, there’s little to say around it, over ration bars and cold water. Hux hypothesizes that there are probably another three to four days of this ahead, and Ren concurs, based on the map as he remembers it.

Even if this—well—sex-based truce holds without a bed to fuck properly in, and Ren remains reasonably affable, there’s no way the next few days will be _ enjoyable. _

Survivable, even, is looking doubtful, especially as the forest has grown thicker, and they haven’t passed a single sign of sentient life in a day’s walk.

What with the cold and the grim specter of the clouds overhead, if it snows, they’re fucked.

Hux is about to point this out, chafing his hands as near to the fire as he can chance, when Ren shifts in his periphery

“Fuck. You’re shivering.” Ren sounds vaguely awed by this.

“Not all of us have a furnace in our—“

Ren’s arm startles the rest of the sentence out of his brain, suddenly heavy around his shoulders, pulling him close. His hand is warm even through the fabric of Hux’s tunic, and it spans Hux’s whole bicep, fingertips rubbing gently.

Hux can’t quite rest his head on Ren’s shoulder, given that they’re basically of a height, but he presses his own against it, relaxing almost against his will. 

It’s bizarre, he thinks, as the sudden warmth in the pit of his stomach starts to spark through his bloodstream. He’s touched and been touched more—and more gently—over the past four days with Ren than in the past thirty years. 

There’s something wrong about that, sure, but makes Ren’s hands that much more welcome, especially now, with the cold and Hux’s own exhaustion.

When Ren’s free hand lands on his thigh, it’s yet another wave of heat, and another as his fingers start to trail up and down it.

As the warmth starts to pool below his waist, Ren ventures higher, reaching under his tunic to palm his cock. Hux breath hitches at the pressure.

“Okay?” Ren murmurs. 

Hux nods. “Yes,” he breathes at another stroke. “Yes, of course.”

“Good.” Ren’s hand moves to his back, as if to brace him, then goes to his fly. “It’ll help you sleep.”

***

It does. 

It isn’t enough to mitigate the ache in Hux’s muscles, not to mention the cold that settles back into his marrow overnight, but it helps. Certainly.

(As does the fact that Ren doesn’t wake him to change watch duty, an unspoken, perhaps unwise consensus that sleep is more important.)

At any rate, Hux is up at first light, surprised by the cloudless sky, and they’re off before sunrise.

The wind is still cold, but progress is good. For some stretches, the mud has even begun to dry. (For unpleasant others, though, the slush has just begun to melt.)

Conversation is only scarce during the slushier parts, when they’re both more or less reduced to muttering the occasional curse between boot-squelches.

Once or twice, though, Ren refers obliquely to a peacekeeping mission or spiritual retreat—his language could suggest either—on a moon called Salin VI that had gone wrong and resulted in a lengthy journey by foot. 

Hux doesn’t recognize the details, so it must predate the Order. He asks as much as he can before Ren goes quiet, then flips the line of questioning back on Hux.

It isn’t that the day passes quickly. All the conifers have long begun to look the same, and it’s fucking cold.

Nonetheless, the suns sink sooner than he expects, and they’re around another sputtering fire within the hour.

Hux beats Ren to the handjob offer, and doesn’t let him reciprocate. 

Or, well. It’s not like he can stop the kiss.

***

Hux awakens, cold, while it’s still full dark. It takes a moment to ground himself, assemble sensations into a coherent narrative.

Joint pain—sleeping on the ground.

Near-total darkness—middle of nowhere.

Sore muscles—the walking.

Sudden chill on his back—Ren must not be—

_ Damn. _

Hux rolls over, hard on his ribs, to find empty ground where Ren was lying with his arm over Hux’s body. The campfire’s embers glow faintly, but it’s the stars that light the clearing, all but the highest hidden by cloud cover.

Hux props himself up on one elbow. “Ren?”

His voice sounds small, even the echo lost to the dense trees. He surveys the clearing. Empty, but for the saddlebag-turned-rucksack.

“What the fuck, Ren?”

Panic closes his throat, and he finds himself rising, for all his legs are unsteady. 

This is not good. This is, in fact, quite possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, simply because he’s powerless to explain or correct it, it’s terrifying, suddenly being alone out here, Hux can’t—

But it isn’t like Ren won’t be back. 

The saddlebag is still here and undisturbed, so it isn’t like he’s abandoned Hux permanently. (Intentionally, anyway.) But hell, he probably hasn’t even been gone long. 

It’s unsettling, though, all the same. The forest feels sinister, colder, now that he’s alone. The outlines of the conifers look monstrous and looming, indistinct dark blurs closing in around the narrow clearing. 

It’s barely three meters at its widest, but Hux finds himself pacing it anyway, suddenly all nervous energy. He crosses it several times before deciding to relight the fire. If Ren’s somehow...lost? (which Ren never gets, but still), he’ll at least have some kind of beacon to guide him back to the campsite.

It’s all Hux can do.

The pacing is hell on his sore thighs, but it’s either that or stay still and let the anxiety pent up in his diaphragm explode him to pieces.

He shouldn’t be this worried.

Ren is more than capable of handling himself. He made sure to take his lightsaber, for all he neglected food and water. It’s probably some stupid Force thing, some bad feeling he had—

_ Fuck. _

Hux severs the thought before it can reach its natural conclusion. 

Ren is fine.

He’s probably on his way back right now.

Ren is fine.

Still, Hux can’t get back to sleep.

***

It’s when the night sky has dissolved into an ashen predawn gray—Ren still isn’t back—that Hux pauses his circuit long enough to actually game this out.

The realization hits him like an ion missile: he could _ just keep going. _

The lane is supposed to be a straight shot to the border, and Hux knows which direction to walk in. And what’s more: Ren does, too.

He’ll have to let Ren find his way back to the campsite, anyway. Hux’s rational mind knows leaving to look for him would do far more harm than good. (Still, what if he’s injured or something, what if he can’t—)

No.

Hux has to stay right here. To wait, for at least a while. Long enough to confirm Ren’s either beyond help, or has left him.

It would be foolish to stay longer. He could wait here until the supplies ran out, and Ren could never come back. Then they’d both be dead out here, the Order would collapse without a leader, and the galaxy would revert to a state of primordial chaos, and everything Hux has spent his whole life building will be for nothing. 

The only thing left will be five planets’ worth of debris in Sector M12 of the Core, not the objective good it was meant to pave the way for. It will all be nothing, it will all be shit, it—

He—

Can’t stay,

Not long.

They are—_ he is _about three days’ march from the border, and there are enough supplies for two comfortable days for both himself and Ren, then a scarce one.

He can give this a day and a night.

No more.

***

As dawn comes on, pink and orange, he has his second key realization: that the thought of leaving Ren—for the good of the Order—shouldn’t feel like a knife to the chest every time it occurs to him.

It’s just that it’ll be a first, after Bylsma’s planet and Starkiller and Ren’s reckless flying thereafter, even staying long enough in Snoke’s wrecked throne room for Ren to wake up and lead the attack on Crait. It’s conditioned into him at this point, for bad or for worse: make damn sure Kylo Ren is okay.

And now, unfortunately, it’s not just because he’s Snoke’s precious apprentice.

If it ever was, given how this week’s shift in Hux’s relationship with Ren feels far less sudden than it should. Feels like the natural progression, almost, of the strange intimacy they’d shared as co-commanders, and that has somehow remained after Snoke’s death, and even the unforgivable things that passed between them then.

There’s no one else like Ren, full stop, of course, but there’s also no one else like Ren in Hux’s life. Never has been.

The first sun climbs the horizon, dimming the campfire but highlighting its smoke, and again Hux can barely restrain himself from leaving the clearing. Running. Screaming Ren’s name.

He’s approved far too many trooper survival protocols to imagine leaving his location would avail anything but a quicker death, but still. It aches, sitting here, doing nothing.

He stops pacing long enough to choke down some water and a few bites of ration bar. By now the second sun has joined the first, casting the forest into an incongruently pleasant golden light. This might even turn into a good day for walking, if Ren were here. If they could make any progress.

***

Hux has never handled boredom well, on the rare occasions he’s experienced it in thirty-four years of full-time war. He’s been conditioned to simply seek the next task, or at least better oneself in _ some way _ during anything considered downtime.

This morning hardly counts as free hours, and the nerves in the pit of his stomach don’t match the numbness of true boredom, but he still has nothing to occupy his hands but occasionally poking at the fire. 

He adds some damp needles to it to keep the stream of smoke steady when the first sun reaches its noon, but instantly regrets it. What--or who--else might see the signal besides Ren? 

But it isn’t like he can stop it now, so he just puts his back to the thick column of black smoke, and covers his mouth and nose with his coat collar as he keeps pacing.

He really ought to be resting his legs. He knows this. He tries this.

But as soon as he sits down, he _ truly _has nothing to do but think, which he can’t allow. He’ll persuade himself to either go after Ren or leave him behind. 

He has no problem with patience, but idleness is wholly different. He can’t handle it, especially not when Ren’s been gone long enough that everything can’t possibly be okay. 

As the afternoon stretches out in front of him, that fact becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. 

All the water bottles are here, so if Ren’s drunk anything, it’s local, unfiltered water that’s even more certain to contain baradium radiation this far north and near the mines. And if he hasn’t drunk anything, that’s equally concerning.

Hux has heard no trace of further Resistance patrols--or any sentient life, for that matter--but that doesn’t matter. They could be on foot. There’s no way he’d let himself be captured, but if he was outnumbered, and refused to surrender…

No.

He’s Ren.

He’s the toughest person Hux has ever met.

***

By the time the first sun has started to wester, Hux’s sore muscles have caught up with him. Legs screaming, he had no choice but to sit down against the tree they slept under. 

Now, against his will, his eyelids keep drooping, between the sleepless night and the warm sunlight filtering down through the canopy of needles overhead. He’s already shed his greatcoat in an effort not to get too cozy, but the drowsiness is like a weight around his neck.

His eyes drift closed for another moment, but he jolts back awake at the sensation of falling, a swoop in his stomach that only exacerbates the anxious coil there. 

“Fuck,” he murmurs aloud, dragging the back of his hand across his eyes, then rubbing furiously. 

Staying awake won’t help Ren get back any more quickly--if he’s coming at all--but it seems wrong to doze off while waiting for him.

Regardless, though, it’s a losing battle.

***

It’s an external sound--not a vertigo-inducing twitch of his muscles--that startles Hux awake into the waning light of late afternoon. 

Just as he woke, it sounded like a rustle or crack, but it doesn’t repeat itself for a long moment. Hux blinks, rubbing his eyes once more, until it repeats. The unmistakable crunch of impact on the dead pine needles that constitute the underbrush.

Hux less jumps than staggers to his feet, bracing a hand against the trunk beside him against momentary dizziness.

The rustle again, and Hux’s mind darts to the canids of several nights ago, now. They’d approached all but silently. (They’d required two to defend against.)

Hux squares his back against the trunk and draws his blaster. He cocks it, but keeps his finger out of the trigger well. He knows better than to call out.

So he waits, as the sound grows closer--then pivots with the muzzle of his blaster at a dark shape in his periphery.

He’s about to fire on reflex, but drops his hand instead. Relief washes over him like high tide. His fingers go limp around the gun itself, and it thuds softly onto the packed earth.

“Ren,” he breathes, heart pounding with delayed adrenaline.

He’d apparently stopped truly expecting him back.

“Hux,” Ren says, even more ragged, and splays his own hand against the nearest tree trunk, at the edge of the clearing, but only a meter from Hux. 

Hux is in front of him in two strides, and only takes him in properly ten centimeters from his face. He’s haggard. Pale. His eyes are bloodshot. A smear of blood bisects his scar.

“Where the _ fuck _were you?”

Ren’s lips part, but he sways on his feet instead of answering, the leather of his glove tightening against the tree trunk. 

Hux’s arm has gone out to steady his other shoulder before he can so much as process the movement. He holds Ren’s gaze for a moment before dropping his own to the rest of Ren’s body. His cloak is even more tattered under Hux’s grip, but his tunic is in worse condition, filthy and-- Torn.

There’s a jagged run in the fabric curving around his side below his left pectoral and stopping at the belt. The undershirt beneath it is also damaged, clinging to a bloodied laceration. Upon closer examination, blood has soaked into the edges of the tunic, as well, though it appears to have dried. It’s hard to tell, though, with the dark fabric.

Hux would like to ask again for whatever details explain any of this, but Ren looks less and less capable of giving a coherent answer every second he’s on his feet.

“Come on.” Hux nods toward the fire and keeps his hand on Ren’s arm.

***

“It isn’t that severe,” Ren insists, as Hux unpeels the fourth too-small bacta patch. “Just big.”

The annoying part is that he’s mostly right. The wound bled decently, but is overall shallow, and at least thus far is showing no signs of infection. The only trouble is that it’s long, and poorly angled--hence Hux and the bacta patches. 

Ren stripped out of the ratty tunic and cleaned the wound himself with bottled water (after draining an open one at Hux’s insistence), but the patches wouldn’t go on tight enough if he tried to bend to stick them on himself.

So he’s propped low against the tree trunk Hux fell asleep against earlier, chest level enough for Hux’s ministrations. The exposed end of the cut sticks out from the three white patches like a lizard’s tail down Ren’s side, long enough that Hux will probably need two more after this one to cover it.

Luckily, eight came with the travel-sized medpac they picked up at the second fuel station, but traveling with only two five-centimeter squares left, their next wounds had best not be worse than a splinter.

Hux smooths down the patch’s edges, running a finger neatly across the seam between soft bandage and hard muscle. Ren’s chest rises and falls with some effort under his touch.

“Were you going to tell me what actually happened?” he asks, drawing back to extract another patch from the package.

He got _ ‘those creatures’ _out of Ren while he scrubbed off the dried blood, but he’s gone quiet after that, alarmingly docile under Hux’s touch. The wound may not be severe, but he’s obviously exhausted.

Hux tears open the patch’s wrapping and discards it to the growing pile of flimsi beside his knee, then carefully pries the patch away from its backing. He takes it delicately between both hands, carefully avoiding the bacta-sticky center, before pressing it onto Ren’s abdomen. He smooths it down with the heel of his hand this time, the slightest massage.

Ren exhales, eyelids fluttering briefly shut. When they open, though, he looks past Hux to the smouldering fire, then down. “It’s stupid.”

Hux traces a finger along the near edge of the patch. “How shocking.”

Ren huffs a tired laugh at that. Bizarrely and fortunately. But then he keeps talking. 

“I have...dreams, sometimes. Bad ones. Sometimes from the Force, sometimes--not. Typically I try to train afterward.” 

Hux nudges him slightly up to stick the next patch on his side, but surveys his solid torso pointedly. “You must have them often.”

“Yeah, well.” Ren’s lip twitches up briefly, but he soon sobers. “That wasn’t an option last night. I got up and decided to walk.”

Hux hums noncommittally.

“I know,” Ren says. “I guess I was still sort of out of my head, because I just...couldn’t stop moving. I wasn’t even thinking about where I was when I heard them coming--” He nods down to the injury. “I handled them with the saber, until one got a swipe in. The Force took care of the rest, but it was--” He inhales as Hux presses down the last patch, then lets his fingers remain, rubbing tiny circles against his ribs. “--a lot. I think I blacked out.”

Hux lifts his hand, echoes numbly, “You think you blacked out.”

Anything could have happened to him out there. He was lucky another pack hadn’t shown up. (Hux is, too.)

“I blacked out,” Ren repeats, sounding peevish. Which is stupid. Hux has _ seen _ him unconscious on multiple occasions; there’s no shame in reporting it. “It was morning when I woke up, but between _ this _\--” Another nod to the scratch. “--and how out of it I’d been, getting back took a while.”

“Clearly.” 

Hux tucks the remaining patches back into the medpac bag, then gathers up the discarded wrappers and backings to pitch them into the saddlebag. He reaches into the detritus at the bottom to extract a ration bar. 

He holds it out to Ren, who’s tugging his tattered tunic back over his head with hissed inhales. For a moment, Hux wonders if he should help, but Ren doesn’t appear to be struggling, just. In pain. Still, he manages quickly enough.

“I’m surprised you were able to orient yourself at all,” Hux says as he takes the bar, tears it open.

“It was just a general direction at first,” he says, around the first bite. “But after a while I could sense you.”

“Sense me?” Hux replies, hesitant. 

It sounds disturbingly like what he mentioned at the motel--the metaphysical _ awareness _ of what Hux had been about to do in the throne room. What if it carried over into the plans to leave him, what if that’s what he’s about to--

“You make yourself very hard to miss.”

Hux snorts at that, lets the flare of anxiety dissolve. He takes out a bar of his own, and they eat in an exhausted sort of quiet.

At some point before full night, Hux rekindles the campfire, or at least goes over to it and pokes at the embers, telling Ren to stay put and not exert himself. 

The fuel catches a bit too quickly to credit Hux’s efforts, but he’s too tired to nag about it. Once he sinks back down against the tree-trunk, thigh pressed against Ren’s, he can hardly keep his eyes open.

It’s Ren‘s hand on his shoulder that startles him into full alertness. “I’ll take first watch.” His voice is oddly gentle, but there’s still an air of command to it that brooks little argument.

Still, Hux makes what effort he can. “I don’t need the rest. I didn’t move more than three meters from this spot all day.”

“You were up before dawn,” Ren seems to observe, lightly massaging Hux’s shoulder. “I was at least unconscious for a while.”

“That isn’t the same—“

“Hux. Please.”

Hux yawns, despite himself, which is still better than thinking too hard about how _ right _‘please’ had sounded on Ren’s lips. He stretches, considering, and nearly drifts again, vision graying at the edges. 

Fine. He’s seldom been one to defy a direct order.


	7. Chapter 7

It isn’t until the next morning, at least an hour down the lane, that Hux asks what Ren dreamt.

He doesn’t answer, at first, just thins his lips like the question is either painful or perplexing. 

Whatever it was, at least it doesn’t seem to have troubled him last night. 

He was still awake, watching the fire die, when Hux woke up and insisted he get some rest. He’d taken little convincing, which was something in and of itself, and had slept the stony sleep of the thoroughly exhausted, hardly so much as turning, which was good for his wound. 

Hux spent most of the next four hours restraining himself from picking a stray pine needle out of Ren’s hair, knowing it would just wake him up again. It had come out on its own when Ren uncurled a little past dawn. They’d been on the road shortly after.

The first sun is now at full brightness. The second follows it closely, tossing orange-ish light onto the drying earth of the lane with the promise of another spring-like day. It’s still cold enough, though, for Hux to draw his coat tight around his shoulders.

“Well?” he repeats, when it’s taken Ren far too many steps to contemplate an answer.

“Like I said--” Ren stares at his boots. “--they’re often nothing. This one was simply…”

Hux barely manages not to prod. He’s patient.

“...the past again. Snoke.” Ren keeps his gaze straight ahead. “Starkiller.”

It took Hux weeks to stop seeing the dying planet, feeling the ground collapse under his feet, every time he closed his eyes.

“Sounds unpleasant,” he says, in a viable entry for understatement of the standard galactic year.

Ren snorts, but continues softly, “I had Snoke in my head for so long, so when I see him now--even though he’s gone--it feels like he’s still...real.”

Hux’s boots clunk against the packed earth. The conifers’ shadows are just beginning to stretch across the lane, clawing west. 

“What did he do?” Hux asks, to fill the silence. “This time, I mean.”

It takes Ren a long moment to answer. When he does, it’s in that same muted tone.

“Things still happened...like they did,” he starts.

“That bad?”

Ren’s lip twitches at that, and he keeps going. “Yeah. But when I was-- After I got injured, I saw  _ him.  _ He was really there, not just the holo. I asked him for help. He said we would wait for you. He didn’t--” 

Ren’s breath hitches, and he starts again. “He didn’t make that enjoyable. As you can imagine.”

Hux can. “Did I ever get there?” he asks, instead of pressing for detail.

“Not before I woke up.”

“I’m sorry?”

Ren shakes his head. “It wasn’t about you--that.” He shoots Hux a sidelong glance. “No offense.”

It’s a jab, but a light one, and Hux lets it roll off. 

Silence settles between them, and it takes a while to feel uncomfortable.

***

There’s little else to say for the rest of the day, not even at breaks, and Hux is halfway convinced he misstepped by asking about the dream at all. 

Ren surely wouldn’t have taken any issue with telling him to shut up, if he hadn’t been willing to discuss it, but it seems to have cast a pall over the fragile camaraderie they’ve built over the past several days. It could just be the exhaustion, too--Hux is far from cheerful himself, after all.

_ But then again, is it even unusual _ ? he thinks at sunset, scooping pine needles onto Ren’s meager pile of firewood. 

He’s been dealing with Ren’s moods in one form or another for the past seven years. He’s always had... _ darker  _ days. It’s just strange caring about them in a context outside how many ship consoles are going to pay the price.

He settles by the pile of kindling to let Ren work his magic and draws his knees to his chest. He wraps the open ends of his coat around his legs as best he can, bracing against the last few minutes of cold.

By all calculations, they’re supposed to reach the border tomorrow, but for some reason, Hux’s mind skips over that more immediate problem entirely. 

Since leaving the motel, he’s been more or less able to avoid thoughts of how the... _ whatever  _ between himself and Ren will look if and when they return to the  _ Finalizer.  _ But with sad return now appearing imminent, against all odds, it’s impossible not to dwell on it.

Ren’s quietness--and the demons that must lie behind it--preoccupies him, too. If this thing continues, he’ll be handling the moods well outside a professional setting. He’ll be stuck  _ giving a shit _ . Indefinitely.

He rummages for bars in the saddlebag to keep from thinking about it.

***

He sucks Ren off to keep from thinking about it.

He lets Ren kiss him soundly to keep from thinking about it.

He falls asleep with his head on Ren’s lap--without even arguing about watch shifts.

***

He doesn’t think about it.

Not until he’s been on his own watch perhaps an hour, the stars are still high, and Ren starts tossing and turning next to him, crying out softly. 

Panic floods Hux’s senses.  _ What if he gets up again, what if he leaves, what if-- _

The thrashing only gets more violent as the minutes pass.

Hux is frozen, which some nagging voice in the back of his mind mocks as rare. He’s heretofore never touched Ren while he’s asleep--for all he’s wanted to the past several days--but there seems no other option. He can’t just sit here and  _ watch this. _

Ren is only a few centimeters away from him, a few stray pine needles crunching under his shifting bulk. 

Hux swallows--he can  _ do  _ this--and puts a hand on Ren’s shoulder, murmuring a sort of shushing sound. For a moment, he’s frozen again, heart thudding in his skull, certain Ren’s going to wake up, going to draw the lightsaber, going--

But instead of tensing into flight or fight mode, Ren stills, muscles relaxing under Hux’s touch. He doesn’t quite stir, and Hux doesn’t move his hand.

***

(Not for a few hours, at least.)

(He throws his coat over Ren when he starts shivering.)

***

The next day, the suns are nearing their respective noons, drifting in and out from behind shreds of cloud, when the first patrol transport passes overhead.

It’s clearly got some kind of muffler on its motivator, but the low whine is fortunately still loud enough that there’s time to get off the lane and under the cover of the treeline. Not that it will do much good against heat sensors, but still.

Hux curls and uncurls his fingers, staying pressed against Ren’s side, until the drone of it passes by. In the quiet that follows, a bird chirps, somewhere high in the canopy.

“I suppose that means we’re getting close,” Hux says, forcing himself to meet Ren’s eyes. 

Ren’s been quiet again for most of the morning. He took off the bacta patches before they started out, and the scratch looked clean, already fading. It shouldn’t be bothering him, but of course, there are a hundred thousand other things that could be.

Now, he looks past Hux, back to the lane. “We should probably stay under cover as long as we can.”

Hux just nods. It’s frankly astounding that this segment of forest has lasted this long. He’s dimly aware that the province’s northernmost reaches are nothing but stripped-out strip mines. Ghost gorges, the locals supposedly call them. 

He’d forgotten. All his research on Chelloa, too, feels like a rumor of a different life

A life, of course, that Hux is clawing tooth and nail to return to, and which he’ll probably settle back into like a second skin, but it’s hard to imagine right now. It’s hard to imagine anything outside of the next obstacle. That, and how, he wishes he could kiss the exhaustion out of Ren’s face.

He would, perhaps, but they’re pressed for time--this has to  _ end _ \--so he turns on his heel, keeps walking forward. Ren follows.

Within two hours, the forest thins out, finally giving way to sprawling flatlands on either side, gray and brown and scarred with the deep gullies of bled-dry baradium mines. They look dead even in the sunlight.

The wind is harsher without the buffer of the trees, and scree from the mines blows across the lane at intervals, smarting against Hux’s face and drying his eyes. His greatcoat is now far more beige than black, at least at the hem. He tries not to care.

It’s the shadow of another shuttle that sends them off the road and down into the nearest of the gorges. It curves a bit, but is surprisingly well-sheltered. They stay in it by unspoken agreement once the shuttle fades from sight and hearing, carefully threading a path amid the gravel and rills.

When a misstep throws Hux off-balance, he scrabbles for the nearest purchase, and lands on Ren’s elbow. Ren’s hand covers his before he can let go. 

Ren still doesn’t have much to say, but he’s looking at the ground ahead with a pinched, concentrating expression that can only mean he’s letting the Force do the navigation work. Hux lets him.

A few more shuttles pass. They duck off, but keep moving in silence as soon as they’re past.

They must be close.

***

The suns are starting to fade when a band of trees interrupts the gorges. At first it’s a pine here and there on the ridges above, then another and another, until the gully they’ve been using slopes up into a thin patch of conifers, bisected by the speeder lane.

It’s as good a spot as any for a short break--there are still a few solid hours of walking before sunset, and perhaps--just perhaps--they’ll hit the border before then. The calculations check out, anyway, and Hux would honestly walk all night just to end this.

Several more shuttles pass even as they’re eating, which is both a good and a bad sign. Ren gives a noncommittal hum when Hux attempts optimism. 

It’s highly unlikely there’s any kind of permanent Resistance presence at the crossing. These shuttles are fairly long-range, right? They could be based five-hundred kilometers away and still be patrolling here.

Nonetheless, Hux interrogates the hum. “Just a feeling?”

Ren crumples up his bar wrapper. “It doesn't matter. We have to keep going.”

Unhelpful and unpromising, but Hux doesn’t bother arguing.

***

The trees’ shadows are growing long across the lane when it suddenly curves sharply, diverting into a sparser side of the forest with a straight shot onto a row of blinking blue lights less than a kilometer down the path. 

Hux’s stomach knots before he can let himself be relieved. A checkpoint, of course.

“We should--” he starts.

Ren’s already veering off the lane again. 

Hux follows him through the underbrush, until they’re close enough to the treeline to make out the faintly bluish light of the ion shield over the province. It extends both directions out from the gap of the checkpoint, glowing faintly in the fading daylight. 

Perhaps there’s an unguarded break in it at some point, but it would be at least another day’s walk--through the gorges, at that--and supplies are low.

At Ren’s suggestion, they move back toward the lane itself, still staying well back from the checkpoint’s direct view, and hopefully the range of any scanners it’s equipped with. 

What covert glances Hux steals show it’s a fairly small outpost--just the post itself, a battered-looking guardshack-cum-barracks, and an open airfield currently holding a single small sublight shuttle. A single rusty ground-crawler sits on the near side of the checkpoint.

They don’t dare get close enough to gauge personnel numbers, but the look of the place doesn’t promise it’s well-staffed.

It ought not, therefore, chill the pit of Hux’s stomach. Under normal circumstances, such a paltry Resistance showing wouldn’t intimidate either of them, but under normal circumstances, they’d have at least a squadron of troopers behind them, if not a full fleet as backup. Also a decent-ish night’s sleep and better nutrition.

But Ren, of course, is failing to acknowledge the odds.

“You stay back,” he’s saying, shifting his weight as if raring to go. He throws a glance over his shoulder in the outpost’s general direction. “I’ll draw my saber, rely on the Force. There can’t be that many of them. I’ll come back for you and the datapad when I’m done.”

“Absolutely not,” Hux returns, around the knot of fear in his throat.

“Do you have a better plan?”

Hux doesn’t, of course, he’s well-aware of that. That isn’t the problem. Or why this plan is so damn foolhardy. 

“You at least need someone covering your back,” he retorts.

Ren shakes his head, too firmly. “No. You’re. A liability.”

What the  _ hell. _

“A liability?” Hux echoes, disbelieving. “Like I was with those creatures the first time? Like I was because I know far more about this planet than you do?”

Even before this week, he thought Ren knew how much he needed him. Has known.

“That isn’t what I mean.” Ren thins his lips, takes a step toward Hux.

“Then what is?”

“I just…” Ren trails off, gaze landing on his dust-streaked boots. “It’s unwise to risk both of us.”

Hux takes a calming inhale. “Of course it is,” he says, bracing himself to stamp the rest of his pride into the pine needles underfoot. “But what chance would  _ I  _ stand alone if you couldn’t handle it?”

“I don’t know, you could at least surrender yourself, I--”

“Kylo Ren.” Hux cups the side of Ren’s face, forcing his gaze straight again. “You know damn well I do not surrender.”

Ren reaches to grip Hux’s wrist. “I know,” he murmurs heavily. “I just…”

Hux runs his thumb along the stubble on Ren’s jaw as he trails off, before dropping his hand entirely. Waiting.

“You can cover me from the treeline,” he says, at last. “Just stay out of direct fire. Please.”

Hux could argue, but he’s honestly always worked better from the backdrop. “Very well,” he says. “Let’s wait until it’s darker.”

It’s impossible to truly rest here, but Hux at least sits down and gulps some water. He somehow manages to convince Ren to do the same, even if his fingers won’t stop tapping along the bottle, the ground, his thigh.

He can’t be properly  _ excited _ , but Hux understands getting dialed up. Just being  _ ready. _

As the second sun dips pink below the horizon, they move further down the lane, still sticking to the trees. Ren thinks it will be best to approach from the northwest than directly--it will keep him concealed that much longer. 

It will put Hux at a slightly worse spotting angle, but his pistol has a decent range and a power pack that’s still over fifty percent charged. He cocks it as they approach the edge of the treeline, scanning for a tree decent enough to position himself behind.

It feels cowardly, ridiculous, but it makes  _ sense _ . Ren needs a secret weapon. And anyway, he tells himself, he can move out from cover at any time. It isn’t like Ren will bother with stopping him. He’ll have other priorities in the midst of a firefight.

When they finally stop, as close to the checkpoint as Hux will get, Ren’s eyes are bright in the twilight. Hux’s throat tightens as his gaze strays toward the lights at the margin of the lane, then returns to Hux, arresting.

“Hux,” he starts, “don’t--”

“I won’t,” Hux says, unsure exactly what he’s promising. He squeezes Ren’s left hand, the one that hasn’t already drawn the saber. “You’ve got this.”

“Yes.”

Hux drops Ren’s hand, and knows his laugh is nothing like a sneer. “Go on, then.”

Ren does. 

Hux hardly breathes as his silhouette grows smaller. Never entirely invisible, even in the gathering dark, or even far enough that Hux can’t hear his footsteps, but it seems to take forever.

There are shouts of  _ stop _ and  _ who’s there _ and  _ hands up  _ as his shadow blocks the lights on the roadblock. Then the saber crackles to life, throwing at least ten guards into sharp relief, with a few more approaching on the edge of sight.

The exchange Ren has with a xeno in a command cap isn’t audible, but it’s brief enough. The Resistance officer collapses with a slash wound to the chest.

Then the blaster fire starts.

A few of the bolts bounce back off the saber and into the throng of guards, but a few go astray, Ren barely blocking them. Hux’s heart races in his ears, and he lifts his pistol.

He isn’t firing  _ thoughtlessly,  _ but he’s working as quickly as he can, with an unfortunate, distance-induced miss here and there. Equally unfortunately, the red arcs of his bolts stand out vividly amid the blue plasma of the Resistance guns, and it isn’t long before they start flying in his direction.

As the first one whizzes past his ear and into a tree behind him, his breath catches in his throat, but he refocuses on Ren’s saber. On eliminating any threat within range of him.

This can’t last forever. 

He takes a few steps closer to the edge of the treeline, never quite losing his cover, but firing as he moves, as he repositions himself. 

He breathes in. Out. Like his range instructors taught him decades ago. His hands stay steady.

In.

Out.

He’s so focused on his next target, and his next, that he misgauges the blue bolt streaking toward him until it’s less than a meter from his shoulder. He ducks too late, the plasma cutting through his great coat with a flare of searing pain.

He loses balance before he can fully register what’s happened. 

Everything goes dark as he hits the ground.

***

His first sensation is a dull ache in his shoulder. That, and a near-total darkness that takes several gummy blinks to adjust to. 

The blurs overhead resolve into the silhouettes of pine branches as the scent of them assaults his nose. Hux’s joints are stiff as he sits up, blinking again as his vision tunnels. The back of his skull throbs a little, and he runs an instinctive hand over it.

All in one piece. Good.

The shot was only to his shoulder.

Right. 

The shot.

The firefight rushes back to him in a flood of images: the flash of Ren’s saber, the trails of blue and red plasma mingling violet in the night air. Ren’s eyes as he left.

This particular figher’s blaster must have been set to stun anyway, as there’s no more damage to Hux’s shoulder than a tender spot where the layers of fabric have been seared apart.

It’s almost enough to delight him--of course the Resistance would go into combat on training mode--but any relief drains out of him as he finally looks back toward the checkpoint. 

The shields still shimmer faintly on either side, and the row of lights on the roadblock glow blue into the night. There’s no other sign of motion. No sound of blasterfire, nor hum of the saber.

_ Fuck. _

Hux collects his blaster from where it fell out of his hand next to him, then braces himself against the nearest tree trunk and staggers to his feet. The blood drains from his head, but he steadies himself quickly. He cocks his blaster again as he reaches the edge of the trees.

A quick survey of the checkpoint reveals no vertical fighters--though plenty of scattered bodies, just black blobs in the blue light and under the stars.

One of them could be--

“No,” Hux corrects the thought aloud. Redirects.

He waits another moment for any sign of movement--tending the wounded, collecting the corpses,  _ something-- _

None occurs.

Okay.

That’s a good sign. 

Perhaps.

His boots feel suddenly leaden as he emerges fully from the cover of the trees, approaching the checkpoint diagonally, both hands on the grip of his blaster.

A part of him wants to yell Ren’s name, but the more rational part knows better. Instead, he points the muzzle of the blaster at every corpse he passes, each one riddled with the telltale scorch marks of lightsaber impact or a bolt from an SE-44C.

He moves slowly. It isn’t like he’s scanning the fallen for Ren. No. He’s just...making sure they’re all truly neutralized. He passes five before he’s even through the checkpoint, and hardly notices as he does so. 

He weaves around the roadblock, avoiding a few more Resistance bodies. The shield looks strange from inside a gap in it--a curved purple line against the sky, hardly a centimeter thick. Hardly anything. 

He keeps moving.

The real anxiety doesn’t set in until he’s circled the whole roadblock. No sign of Ren, nothing but smouldering lightsaber wounds. 

No.

He has to be here.

Unless he somehow commed for the Order using Resistance equipment, left Hux for dead. Unless he was captured, the Central Resistance has come and gone. And also left Hux.

Panic rises in his throat.

“He has to be here,” he repeats aloud, wildly scanning the roadblock’s perimeter for anything he’d possibly missed. He doesn’t miss things, he doesn’t--

He stops mid-step, though, as he faces the guard shack. A single body lies on the ground in front of it, shapeless from here, as if caught midway out of the fray. It’s like a punch to the chest.

Hux hurries toward it, hardly sparing any of the others a glance. He’s nearly in range to make out its features when--

“Hux.”

Hux stops dead, whirls toward the voice on instinct, a full 180 degrees. Ren’s a meter ahead of him, cast blue from the glow behind.

Hux lets out an exhale and jogs toward him, tucking his blaster back into his coat. He hasn’t fully stopped moving before Ren’s arms are around him, crushing him against his chest. Hux’s muscles relax despite the impact to his bruised shoulder. He loops his own arms around Ren’s waist, presses his face into Ren’s neck.

He smells like ozone and xeno blood, pine needles and three days of spit baths. Hux doesn’t care. He kneads his fingertips into the tattered fabric of Ren’s cloak. Just breathes.

“Where were you?” he whispers, after a moment, without letting go.

“Looking for you,” Ren returns, nuzzling against Hux’s ear. “I knew something was wrong when your bolts stopped coming, but then after, when you weren’t where I’d left you--”

“I changed positions. It was stupid,” Hux says, loosening his grip enough to draw back and meet Ren’s eyes. “I’m still here.”

“You are.” A small smile cracks Ren’s features. A smear of soot runs next to his scar, and his hair hangs lank and dirty around his face. Hux combs it back behind his ears anyway. 

His lip is split, too.

Hux kisses him. Anyway.

It isn’t a long kiss, but there’s a gentleness to it Hux didn’t realize Ren possessed. His own hands slip down, burrow into Ren’s cloak, pull him closer. His mouth is dry, lips still cracked beside the blood, but it’s hard to care. His hands slide down Hux’s sides, like he’s being enveloped, then come to rest at his waist.

Hux draws back first, but doesn’t let go of Ren’s cloak. Ren tips his chin up as he’s catching his breath.

“Hey.”

“Yes?”

Ren lifts his other hand from Hux’s waist to heft the strap on his shoulder. The gesture crystallizes instantly into the entire goal here.

“You got the bag,” Hux says.

“Like I said--” Ren lets go of Hux’s chin with a stroke of his thumb, then slides the saddlebag off his shoulder entirely. He opens it, digs inside. “--I expected to find you beside it.”

“Sorry about--” Hux murmurs. It’s all he can do not to press himself into Ren’s body again, but they aren’t done yet.

Ren extracts Hux’s datapad, puts it in Hux’s outstretched hands.

It powers up quickly for nearly a week out of commission, and still holds a ten-percent battery charge. He pulls up its network settings, biting his lip.

“ _ Searching _ ,” he reads aloud. The signal bar undulates from one bar to three. Back down. Back up. “ _ Searching. _ ”

“Okay.”

“Come on,” Hux murmurs to the device as the bar keeps blinking. “Come on.”

Maybe they’re still too close to the shield for the signal to activate. Maybe Hux’s datapad has been remotely removed from the network, maybe there’s been a coup in both their absence, maybe--

The datapad dings. 

Hux’s breath hitches.

Four bars. Steady.

“ _ Network detected. Comms available _ ”

“Fuck yes,” Ren breathes.

Hux enables the locator function and activates the comm. Looks up at Ren and smiles.

***

The  _ Upsilon _ -class feels unfamiliar after so long outside any kind of enclosed vehicle, much less a state-of-the-art, hyperspace-capable First Order command shuttle. 

The thrum of the engine is actually  _ noticeable _ , rather than simply background noise. In the warmth of the shuttle’s small command room, it’s almost lulling. Hux tips his head back against the panel, closes his eyes, and lets the vibration sink into his bones.

The shuttle arrived after a brief, somewhat tense wait in the guardshack, during which Hux and Ren huddled around the datapad, catching up on as many highlights from their time out of commission as possible.

As it turns out, none of High Command has declared themself Supreme Leader in Ren’s absence, though Peavey has been issuing more and more assertive orders from the deck of the  _ Finalizer.  _ Ren recorded an audio transmission that set him to rights, and received a  _ Yes, sir. Standing down from command _ , within a standard minute.

Otherwise, the war continues much as expected, though signals intelligence indicates hopeful rumbles of Hux and Ren’s disappearance throughout Resistance circles. There were--still are--high bounties on both their heads.

It was enough news to keep them both professionally occupied until the shuttle arrived, and Hux commandeered its only sonic shower within minutes of breaking atmo.

He kept it short, mostly for Ren’s benefit, and changed into a clean spare major’s uniform--all that was on hand--before heading into the command room and sinking onto the bench he’s currently occupying. He’d intended to keep catching up, but exhaustion took over first, his eyelids falling shut against his will.

He’s almost comfortable enough--between the padded bench, the warmth of the room, and the buzz of the hyperdrive--to fall asleep, but sudden pressure on the other side of the bench stirs him back to full alertness.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Ren says, settling beside Hux. He looks almost apologetic.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

The bench is narrow, and their thighs nearly touch. Hux closes the gap, places a hand on Ren’s, pressing against the surprising softness of his side.

“Not yet,” Ren murmurs, as his arm loops around Hux’s shoulders, his hand coming to rest on the one opposite Hux’s bruise.

“I’m trying. There’ll be little time for it once--” Hux represses a yawn. “--we get back.”

“Yeah,” Ren agrees, his gaze flicking down. His thumb, though, rubs circles in Hux’s skin. “And I’ve...kind of gotten used to sleeping near you.”

“ _ Near  _ me?” Hux laughs despite himself. “Is that it?”

“Among other things.”

Hux strokes his thigh, but nestles against his shoulder. “I believe those can be arranged.”

“Can’t wait,” Ren murmurs, with a tired smile

His presence should be anything but calming, but then Hux should be anywhere but somewhere between Chelloa and the _Finalizer, _in his arms. 

After a few quiet moments, Ren’s breathing falls into the languid pace of sleep. Hux finds his own eyelids drifting shut, Ren’s head resting on his own, all of him a warm, solid weight. 

Ren’s breaths come soft, slow, barely audible above the ship. As sleep washes over Hux, he lets his own match them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> Gaylo Ben's [tumblr](https://gaylo-ben.tumblr.com/)
> 
> My [Twitter](https://twitter.com/imperialhuxness)


End file.
